Dinner Lab offers its members a chance to eat new food, dine in new settings and meet new friends with a common love of food. Photo by Hannah McSwain.

As this week’s cover story, column and events calendar should make abundantly clear, this month marks for the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches, a commemoration with a special resonance for Birmingham, another Alabama city that staged heroic idealism and bitter tragedy while the world looked on. The Magic City has long struggled to reconcile the scars of its past with its dreams for the future, but if the town’s much-touted cultural renaissance is any indication, the answer may lie in a surprisingly humble place: food.

Following in the wake of such chefs as Frank Stitt, Chris Hastings and Chris Dupont, Birmingham has emerged as a culinary heavyweight in the South, and it’s attracted the attention of an intriguing, innovative take on the idea of the pop-up restaurant. On the evening of April 17, Dinner Lab will host its inaugural dinner in Birmingham, benefiting UAB’s Minority Health and Health Disparities Research Center (MHRC).

Founded in New Orleans, Dinner Lab began as an attempt to diversify the city’s culinary landscape by offering local chefs an attempt to cook something outside of the Southern, Cajun or Creole norms. After early setbacks, the company accrued a network of talented chefs across the country, hosting pop-up dinners on each coast. In just two years, Dinner Lab has emerged as a platform for ambitious sous chefs and line cooks to craft and test out their own personalized menus, as well as an opportunity for foodies to have a unique dining experience.

“In the restaurant industry, there’s not really a place to prototype your menus and ideas,” said Francisco “Paco” Robert, chief operating officer of Dinner Lab. “You find an investor, you have a tasting or two, you spend a lot of money, cut the ribbon, and the critics come and tell you yea or nay, and the Yelpers give you a lot of feedback, but it’s usually not very constructive.

“So why Birmingham? I think it’s very similar to New Orleans in the sense that there’s not that much diversity when it comes to ethnic cuisine,” Robert added. “Now that we’ve created a pretty diverse network of chefs — we wanted to expand to the San Franciscos and New Yorks of the world at first, because that’s where the chefs were and are — now that we’ve created a nice network of chefs, we can start coming into the smaller cities that have that same original problem that New Orleans had. We want to be a platform for the up-and-coming local chefs as well, but also to inject some diversity.”

Because of New Orleans’ unique bylaws for Mardi Gras krewes, Dinner Lab is a membership-based organization, with yearly memberships costing $125. The annual fee may be steep for most, but the individual tickets — $50-55 for a five-course meal, which includes drinks and gratuity — are eminently reasonable in the context of high-quality dinners. Robert said the company plans to have two dinners per month in Birmingham by June, and Dinner Lab members will know the menu of each meal well in advance, but will only learn the location of the dinner 24 hours ahead of time.

Dinner Lab is predicated on two goals, according to Robert: giving would-be restaurateurs a platform to express themselves, and giving a unique dining experience to new markets.

“No sous chef ever wants to stay a sous chef,” Robert said. “There’s a lot of horizontal movement in the restaurant industry, and if there’s any way we can tweak that needle in a more vertical direction, that’s part of the goal. A place for them to test out and prototype, but also ideally have that Top Chef [experience], but real, not just a cash prize at the end.”

24-year-old Chef Kwame Onwuachi will curate the first Dinner Lab menu in Birmingham, a benefit for UAB’s Minority Health and Health Disparities Research Center. Photo by Aaron Lyles.

One of Dinner Lab’s biggest success stories is Kwame Onwuachi, the 24-year-old chef who will curate the inaugural Birmingham dinner. Onwuachi was raised in Brooklyn, has Nigerian grandparents and a mother living in New Orleans, giving him a unique blend of culinary backgrounds, and successful Dinner Lab networking has led to Onwuachi opening his own restaurant in Washington D.C. His April 17 dinner will feature courses including beet-cured hamachi, quail confit and dry-aged sirloin with pickled quail eggs.

“Typically [culinary] deconstruction or molecular-based cuisine doesn’t really work for us,” Stithem, who helps curate each Dinner Lab menu, said. “Sure, we’ll incorporate some of those elements, but for the most part the food is naturally humble by virtue of our situation. That’s not to say that we don’t have a progressive cuisine ethic — we absolutely do. But there’s not going to be an excess of foams on your plate, or powders and soils. … I try and keep people honest.

“We definitely get a lot of nontraditional takes on ethnic cuisine, because you have these very talented kids from multicultural backgrounds working in really nice restaurants, and they want to incorporate their technique and their family history as well,” Stithem continued. “The instances where we get a basic Ethiopian meal…are very rare, because people want to showcase how talented they are. Outside of that, it still takes a nice balance to make each market have an eclectic selection on the menu and not do the market a disservice – we don’t want to stroll in and change the market, we want to embrace the market itself.”

Robert, a Vestavia Hills High School graduate who has worked with Chris Hastings in the past, is also keenly aware of trying to keep the context of a city in mind when planning out menus — and when trying to network with executive chefs, who are likely to see Dinner Lab as competition, or as trying to poach their line cook talent. With Dinner Lab’s national lineup of chefs — according to Robert, the chefs who create each menu are roughly 50 percent visiting from out of town, like Onwuachi, and 50 percent local chefs — touring chefs are given an opportunity to be ambassadors for their executive chefs and their cities, Robert said.

First and foremost, Robert and Stithem both pointed out, Dinner Lab is meant to be a unique way for chefs to express themselves. “You do have a creative outlet in a restaurant setting, but it’s usually within the confines of what that restaurant’s cooking,” Robert said. “I’m from Puerto Rico — I would not be putting Puerto Rican specials or anything Puerto Rican-flavored out when I was working with Chris Hastings. Yet if I ever opened up a restaurant…I learned to cook with Grandma, and I’d want Puerto Rican flavors. And I think the key is finding that. That is the point of the company: someone who wants to do something different, someone who’s local, but who doesn’t have the opportunity.”

It only seems appropriate that Dinner Lab — which began as an attempt to inject diversity into New Orleans’ culinary life, and which prides itself on giving its members a chance to eat new food, discover new settings and meet new people with a common love of food — is kicking off its entry into Birmingham with a benefit for UAB’s MHRC, which is dedicated to analyzing and trying to mitigate the myriad health disparities in the state.

“We are pleased to introduce Dinner Lab to Birmingham,” Dr. Mona Fouad, founding director of the UAB MHRC, said in a press release. “Dinner Lab nurtures rising chefs, giving them an opportunity to experiment and excel, similar to the support the MHRC provides for scientists and scholars working to reduce health disparities.” Proceeds from the dinner will go to support MHRC programs to improve the health of vulnerable populations and disadvantaged communities in Alabama and across the country.

]]>Despite the optimism that emerged in Alabama’s LGBT community and its allies following in the wake of a federal judge’s decision to strike down Alabama’s gay marriage ban on Jan. 23, it’s since become clear that the state of gay rights in Alabama remain in their usual perilous position.

There are reasons to be cheerful, though. On a micro-level, that includes a local spin on The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game that prioritizes equality, accepting applications from straight and gay contestants and couples alike. Romantically Challenged, hosted by emceeing and equality aficionado Max Rykov, will take place at the Bottletree on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14.

As with those old shows, the games’ format will feature Rykov in the Jim Lange/Bob Eubanks role, facilitating a mildly risqué Q&A between a contestant and his or her would-be dates, then getting to see just how well local couples know each other.

“It’s straightforward,” Rykov said of the games, “but what’s cool about it is that it’s both gay and straight. Everyone’s welcome. There’s 36 states that have gay marriage now – and it’s crazy that that’s a thing that could be illegal at all – and thinking that we’ll either be last or second-to-last [among states to ratify gay marriage]…it’s cool to see that there is some support for that community in Birmingham, to see that Alabamians aren’t across-the-board homophobic lunatics.”

Rykov also sees Romantically Challenged as an opportunity to present a fun alternative to the sometimes dehumanizing tedium of online dating. “With the advent of the internet, I think interpersonal skills have declined when it comes to dating,” Rykov said. “What really makes a potential relationship work isn’t sending messages back and forth; it’s being able to come up with witty answers to arbitrary questions in front of the viewing public.

“There’s really no better way to find true love than to be onstage and play a silly game in the manner of a 1960s and ‘70s-style television show,” Rykov added. “It’s proven to work.”

Doors will open for Romantically Challenged at 8 p.m., with the show at 9 p.m. Tickets are $15.

]]>https://weldbham.com/blog/2015/02/01/looking-for-love-birmingham-lgbt-romantically-challenged/feed/0Still liveshttps://weldbham.com/blog/2015/01/27/still-lives-small-treasures-birmingham-museum-art/
https://weldbham.com/blog/2015/01/27/still-lives-small-treasures-birmingham-museum-art/#respondWed, 28 Jan 2015 04:47:41 +0000http://weldbham.com/?p=19040Birmingham Museum of Art to show small works from big painters.

The fourth such exhibition has a lot to live up to, since it follows exhibitions featuring the most popular American artist of all time, the leader of the French Romantic school and a forerunner of Impressionism, and a highly entertaining show of samurai artifacts. But Small Treasures: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals and Their Contemporaries, opening Jan. 31 and running through April 26, is just as intriguing in a subtler way.

The exhibition features 40 small-scale oil paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, when the newly independent Netherlands became one of the most powerful nations in Europe. The works in Small Treasures include household names like Rembrandt and Vermeer, but the real attraction of the show is the unique intimacy of the small-scale art, revealing the personalities both of individual people and of a culture at the height of its glory.

The painters in Small Treasures were drawing on a unique tradition, according to Robert Schindler, the museum’s curator of European art. Instead of egg-based paints, Schindler said, the Dutch prioritized the use of oil-based paints, which “allowed artists to have a range of different options at their disposal. You could apply them very thinly, with underlying paint layers showing through. The level of detail that you could achieve was greater. There was also interest in showing their surroundings: Dutch interiors, the appearance of their countryside in landscape paintings, depicting fabrics.

“That interest in detail, meticulous finish, mastering oil painting, the interest in recording surroundings – actual things in your environment – all of that carries through into the 17th century,” Schindler continued. “There is a newly found variety in terms of subject matter. What Dutch Golden Age paintings are really well known for is genre painting on an unprecedented scale. … It really gets going in the 17th century with all these painters showing peasant scenes, tavern scenes, Dutch interiors, women tending to their children, cleaning their houses, etc.”

That wide range of subject matter – as well as the small army of artists who were able not merely to find work, but also to enrich themselves during the period – is indicative of the Netherlands’ thriving economy in the 17th century. With new social classes came the resources to try and preserve pieces of family histories; portraits tried to capture not just a person’s likeness, but the essence of their personality.

“Portraits, of course, show people,” Schindler said. “In some cases they were passed down in families through the centuries. They serve as memorials to loved ones or deceased family members. At a time when there’s no photography, a painting is the one way to record the likeness of someone else.

“But it’s not just about physical resemblance,” Schindler added. “Frans Hals was probably the greatest portrait painter in Haarlem…of the period. And he was known at the time for being able to bring his sitters to life through paint and brush. It goes beyond physical appearance, giving a sense of who that person is and developing a personality. Going through the show, there are a lot of portraits, but there’s so much variation, there are so many intriguing things to look at.”

The most intriguing things are the ways in which these people who lived centuries ago seem to come to life again within their portraits. William Faulkner wrote that, “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” Particularly in Vermeer’s Girl in the Red Hat, Hals’ portraits and in the many self-portraits on display in the show, these people move again, with all the virtues and vices that come with humanity on full display.

They also reveal a great deal about the energy and wealth of their culture. Social standing, economic class, character traits and more are all in full view, often depicted very self-consciously. Gerrit Dou, one of Rembrandt’s students, “shows himself in his very best clothes: hat, overcoat with the fur lining, very expensive leather clothes,” Schindler pointed out. “This is something that he has achieved by way of his profession, his painting. And you learn about his profession in the background of the painting: there’s an easel in the background.”

The works in Small Treasures are indeed small, in the sense that their subject matter doesn’t feature any historical figures crossing the Alps or the Rubicon. But the content of the exhibition is only truly small if you aren’t interested in people – in their eccentricities, in their emotions, in their pretensions. Because above all else, Small Treasures is a show for people who are fascinated by other people, who never tire of the surprises we hold for one another.

“Small doesn’t mean it’s not important,” Schindler said. “I think this show perfectly illustrates that. If you bring some time and an open mind, and you’re willing to take your time investigating standing in front of a painting, you’ll discover really great, fun things.”

Small Treasures will open to the public on Jan. 30 with a 6-9 p.m. opening reception called “Small Paintings, Big Party!” Tickets to the party are $25 for non-members. Admission to the exhibition alone is $12. For more information, call (205) 254-2565 or visit artsbma.org.

A rendering of a dot matrix painting by R2 PaintBot, a system designed by UAB students. Image courtesy of Marc Parker.

As befits a city undergoing a cultural renaissance, Birmingham has a vibrant arts scene, including an abundance of murals livening up local businesses such as Trim Tab Brewing Co. and John’s City Diner, not to mention those sprucing up run-down or nondescript areas. If a group of UAB engineering students manage to secure funding for their senior project, a fascinating synthetic tool could be joining the city’s creative energy.

Their project is called R2 PaintBot, an automated mural painting system inspired by the Magic City Mural Collective’s 99 Murals in 99 Neighborhoods project. Although PaintBot has a long way to go before its completion, the current plans would have the machine using RC servomotors and four airbrushes — with cyan, magenta, yellow and black paint — to paint a dot matrix of an image on a brick wall.

“Right now, physically, it’s able to do almost nothing because we’ve been raising money to try and buy parts,” said Marc Parker, who is leading the project alongside fellow students Jason Pate, Jazman Brock, Veronica Smith and Julia Woods, with Professor Doug Ross serving as faculty mentor. “All we can do right now, basically, is operate one motor.”

Parker was inspired to begin the project after seeing the mural collective’s own crowdfunding effort for the mural at Trim Tab, which he volunteered to help out painting. “I helped paint the mural that’s on top of Trim Tab now,” he said, “and I learned how difficult and tedious it is just to get it level. Most of the creativity involved in it is in designing, in the ideation stage, and painting the fine detail of those.”

To help simplify and streamline the process — as well as to contribute to his own creative output without switching careers to become a sculptor or architect — Parker came up with the PaintBot idea, which the mural collective has given its support to. After initially suggesting some Jackson Pollock-inspired designs for the robot to paint, the collective might now collaborate with UAB by using PaintBot to outline their murals.

“One thing I feel like was a selling point for everybody is that it would create a cool effect where you see it from far-off, and you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s a really detailed image,’ and when you’re close-up it just looks like dots,” Parker said.

The mural collective’s support may also derive from the fact that PaintBot isn’t going to be putting any working artists out of business, according to Parker. “If you wanted to have something with smooth lines, like really large letters, we’ve already tested the simulation and it looks terrible,” he said with a laugh. “You would never want ‘It’s Nice to Have You in Birmingham’ or ‘You Are Beautiful’ painted by the system that we’re designing.”

Even so, PaintBot’s dot matrix-based system — known as raster graphics — opens up interesting functional and aesthetic possibilities, from its aforementioned usefulness in organizing large-scale painting to its potential to recreate works of artists like Georges Seurat, who led the Pointillist movement, or of Roy Lichtenstein, whose pop art made frequent use of Ben-Day dots.

“Drowning Girl” by Roy Lichtenstein, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

While it may seem unusual for a group of engineers to try their hands at an artistic endeavor, Parker believes that the PaintBot project fits an expanding definition of the problems that engineering can address.

“There is an inherent economic aspect to engineering,” Parker said, “that engineering is the application of math and science to achieve economic ends. But an economic end is a need, which are usually expressed as wants. There are a lot of different alternatives by which a need can be expressed. If I’m hungry, I could eat pastrami, I could eat a kale salad, I could eat mac ‘n cheese. For so long in America, amongst engineers, we’ve thought of needs as involving money and natural resources — how to get a highway built from Point A to Point B, or how to get more data processing power, stuff like that. But beauty in our lives? Art is a real need for human beings. Needs don’t necessarily have to be met by something expensive, or that has high monetary return on investment.

“Filling the need that art does seems like a practical effort as well, because it’s a real need,” Parker added. “I don’t really understand why loneliness, or existential angst, isn’t a practical issue just as much as hunger and being too cold.”

With the help of his team and Dr. Ross, Parker is planning to have PaintBot completed, tested and refined by April 12. In order to make the project possible, however, the team is making use of a new, local crowdfunding platform.

“UAB has just started a crowdfunding platform for projects there — we were planning on going with Kickstarter first…but all of the donations to this will be tax-deductible. One other thing, too: because all of the people are donating to UAB, the accounting is connected, so if we need to buy components before the campaign is over, we can do that,” Parker said.

The PaintBot crowdfunding initiative will launch at crowdfund.uab.edu on Jan. 30, and Parker hopes that a successful result will have ramifications well beyond the city’s arts community.

“I don’t have much knowledge about business in Birmingham, but I’ve heard that Birmingham has a great technology community,” Parker said. “There are a lot of fantastic people here, but there’s a real need for local capital available for investment. I hope that this could be a good test case for something that could get funded by the community that doesn’t have to have a single angel investor or venture capital firm.”

While Parker doesn’t see the PaintBot model thriving nationally — he’s as familiar with PaintBot’s limitations as anybody — he believes it could be an ideal fit for Birmingham’s unique economic and artistic ecosystem.

“I feel like it could work in Birmingham because it was made in Birmingham, it was funded by citizens of Birmingham and it has designers in Birmingham in mind,” Parker said. “It’s completely contextualized.”

With any luck, Birmingham’s biggest art show in 2015 won’t feel like an art show at all. Warhol: Fabricated, opening to the public on Jan. 9, captures the playfulness and irreverence of Warhol’s work in a collection of the Pittsburgh native’s prints, photographs and more that have never been exhibited together.

“I wanted it to be fun, that’s the bottom line,” said AEIVA Curator John Fields, who has been planning the exhibition since last summer. “The real challenge was that, because the foundation gave out this large gift to, like, 80 different universities, there have been around 88 Warhol shows in the United States in the last 10 years. So the question becomes, how do we do a Warhol show differently?”

The answer? With panache. Warhol: Fabricated is a mammoth undertaking, featuring works across several decades of Warhol’s life, but the exhibition flows through AEIVA’s three gallery spaces with unhurried ease, beginning with a photograph of Warhol lounging on a couch by celebrated civil rights photographer Bob Adelman.

The first gallery is filled with Warhol’s Silver Clouds, which look like silver plastic pillows filled with a mixture of helium and oxygen that exhibition attendees are welcome to bounce around. Carried aloft by helium, oscillating fans and overzealous viewers, the Silver Clouds set a pointedly un-serious tone for an exhibition from America’s great pop artist.

“There’s a lot of commentary that you can read into this,” Fields said of the exhibition’s central gallery, “but it’s also got this wonderful tackiness, which is what I think of when I think of Warhol: fabulous tackiness.” The marvelously, unapologetically gaudy style of Warhol: Fabricated, which truly comes to life in the exhibition’s middle gallery, is a loving homage to its featured artist.

The Warhol Foundation’s gifts are on display in the central gallery, which is full of characteristically colorful prints from Warhol’s Factory studio. Juxtaposing portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Mick Jagger alongside figures like Vladimir Lenin may seem counterintuitive — in a stroke of brilliance, Fields has even set a ghoulish portrait of Richard Nixon, commissioned by the 1972 George McGovern campaign, against a wallpaper full of purple Chairman Mao images — but they reveal Warhol’s eternal fascination with icons of any kind, no matter the reason for their celebrity.

The central gallery also introduces the major theme of the show, which is the question of appropriation — a question that certainly dogged Warhol during his life. On the far wall of the gallery is a series of “Old West” prints, which feature such figures as Sitting Bull with Warhol’s trademark garishness. The images speak not only to Warhol’s appropriation of specific images, but also to America’s appropriation of Native American territory and its self-mythologizing into a simple narrative of cowboys and Indians.

The questions around Warhol expand in the show’s third gallery, which deepens Warhol’s art by featuring his screen tests and 90 Polaroid prints (gifted to UAB by the Warhol Foundation in 2008), as well as those questions of appropriation by featuring the works of artist Charles Lutz. Lutz, who will be part of a panel discussion on Warhol on the afternoon of Jan. 9, is as clear an heir to Warhol’s legacy as anyone else. A Pittsburgh native like Warhol, Lutz served as a studio assistant to controversial artist Jeff Koons before achieving his own notoriety with a show that commented directly on Warhol’s legacy.

“What he did was he recreated several Warhol pieces and sent them to have them authenticated, and of course they got stamped ‘DENIED’. When they got sent back to him, he started showing them immediately. After he got that first ‘DENIED’ stamp, he started recreating that ‘DENIED’ stamp,” Fields explained.

“His work raises so many issues about Warhol and authenticity and appropriation,” Fields continued. “He’s basically stealing Warhol’s images, who was sued hundreds of times for stealing other people’s images. He didn’t care. There was never any attempt to get permission to use these images. He appropriated whatever he felt like. The idea of how we assign value — to art, to everything — Charles’ work comments directly on that.”

Warhol is likely the most influential artist of the 20th century, not simply because of his own work, but because of the unique way he marketed both it and himself. Many Americans would be able to recognize a Norman Rockwell illustration, but couldn’t pick the artist himself out of a lineup; Warhol had no such problem. In a postmodern world, Warhol managed to connect his work’s value intrinsically with his own enigmatic, carefully crafted persona.

“He was very layered,” Fields said. “There’s that surface Warhol, where he’s obsessed with celebrity and pop culture — he was on The Love Boat, and to have a living contemporary artist reach that level of fame, it’s almost unheard of — my mom knows who Warhol is. He’s probably the most identifiable artist of the 20th century. … It’s fun to look at how much of Warhol was a persona and how much of it was the real person.

As stellar as the works exhibited within Warhol: Fabricated are, it’s Warhol’s lasting cultural resonance that makes the show such an event for Birmingham. With the advent of the Internet, we’re truly living in a post-Warhol age.

“I think that if he were alive, he’d totally have a YouTube channel,” Fields said of Warhol. “He’d eat social media up. He said that in the future, everyone would have their 15 minutes of fame, and that’s actually kind of possible now.”

Warhol: Fabricated explores the nuances of Warhol’s persona and cultural influence — and it was made possible, of course, by Warhol’s famously benevolent foundation — but it’s also a massive achievement for AEIVA, and by extension, Birmingham.

“I feel really proud of what we did that first year, but this Warhol exhibition shows that we’ve really got our footing, and we’re hoping from here on out that each of our shows will be of this level,” Fields said. “We’re already planning a show for 2018. … That was sort of the intent of the building all along, to be able to do these large-scale, high-profile exhibitions that we never could have done in the old space. Now that we’ve got through our first year and worked out the kinks, this is the first of many big shows.”

Let’s hope he’s right. With its potentially global profile, thoughtful arrangement and playful intersection of high and low culture, Warhol: Fabricated sets a wonderfully high bar for the rest of 2015.

]]>When UAB’s football program was unceremoniously canceled a week ago, it was a reminder — disconcerting for some, gleeful for others — that for all the talk of Birmingham’s renaissance, this city is systematically and by design not in control of its own destiny. However much progress the city has made since the dark ages of Jim Crow, the statewide political calculus is still very much tied to its 1901 constitution.

But take heart, Birmingham. During the actual capital-R Renaissance, Italian city-states were tasked with fending off assaults from the Holy Roman Empire and France, not to mention their prolonged and vicious wars against one another. Despite losing pretty convincingly in each of those conflicts, it was Italy’s art and philosophy that came to dominate the rest of Europe, not that of its conquerors. As Orson Welles put it in The Third Man, “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.”

Nobody in Birmingham produced the Sistine Chapel or Mona Lisa this year, but it was still a banner year for culture in the Magic City. Nowhere was that more evident than 2o14’s crop of local music, which not only made life easier for certain local music writers, but also features music that defines the city’s present moment and which gives it reasons to be proud moving forward. It’s not going to shake up the statehouse in Montgomery, but Birmingham’s cultural ecosystem may give it the sort of artistic footprint to compare to the legendary salad days of Muscle Shoals.

Here follows a list of this particular music writer’s favorite local records of 2014, all of which would make excellent gifts for the folks on your list who happen to have wonderful taste. It’s a testament to just how good Birmingham’s music scene is right now that worthy contributions from acts like the Dirty Lungs, Corey Nolen and Plains didn’t make the cut, as well as the fact that yours truly had to disqualify Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires and St. Paul and the Broken Bones to keep things interesting.

Without further ado — and that really was a lot of ado, sorry — the top five Birmingham records of 2014:

5.Noel —I Won’t Answer: “I feel about as low as any soul could go and still be saved,” Noel Johnson sings on the first track to this ambitious opus on God and man. Things only get more complicated from there, as Johnson explores the tenuous state of the spiritual in a corrupted material world — or, in the album’s worldview, the tenuous state of a corrupted material world whose time is rapidly approaching. As grim as that might sound, the record breezes along thanks to Johnson’s ear for melody, Armand Margjeka and three-time Grammy winner Darrell Thorp’s excellent production style, and I Won’t Answer’s unique synthesis of old-time blues, gospel music and Beck-style experimental rock. If the apocalypse is looking for a soundtrack, it could do a lot worse than I Won’t Answer.

4.Wray —Wray: The second Communicating Vessels release on this list, Wray is docked points mainly for being the size of an EP; otherwise, it’s pretty hard to find fault with the record. Wray make music that sounds like pure sonic nostalgia, distilling the yearning of ‘80s synthpop, the energy of mid-‘90s indie rock and the gorgeous textures of shoegaze music into a combination that’s pure bliss to listen to, particularly on the record’s flawless opening suite of songs. If you’d told me two years ago that a Birmingham record could sound this good, I wouldn’t have believed you.

3.Drew Price —Hustle Strange: If he’s not a pop music genius, Drew Price is something perpendicular to that. Every song, whether it’s a churning electronic anthem, a goofy trifle or a psychedelic freakout, features the same effortless pop sensibility. Even if Hustle Strange can be a little too relaxed for its own good, it features hooks for days, with any given song on the album’s chill first half likely to get stuck in your head. Despite the constant Mac DeMarco comparisons, Price’s music is unique — not just because of his songwriter’s voice, but because of how perfectly it fits a specific time and place. With Hustle Strange, Price captured what it feels like to be a twentysomething trying to figure things out in a city that’s trying to figure things out, too.

2.The Green Seed — Drapetomania: At the Green Seed’s set at this year’s Secret Stages festival, the hip-hop foursome performed their set like conquering heroes. After releasing the best record from Communicating Vessels’ insane summer crop of albums, they had every right to. If Hustle Strange is the record Birmingham needs now, then Drapetomania is the record it needs going forward, a bold, clever and endlessly charismatic testament to friendship, faith and hope that doesn’t gloss over issues of race and class. Birmingham doesn’t deserve to take a victory lap yet, but if it follows the Green Seed’s lead, it’ll be on the right track.

1.Holy Youth —Holy Youth: Alabama’s musical history is littered with great acts — The Sex Clark Five and Carnival Season both come to mind — who are now basically forgotten thanks to the complete lack of infrastructure at the time. Though they’re not a retro act by any means, Holy Youth sound like one of those forgotten treasures, a band whose masterpiece of a debut LP wouldn’t seem out of place next to old Blondie and Nerves cassettes. Holy Youth features some of the best power pop songwriting yours truly has ever heard, pairing bleak songs about frayed relationships with irresistible hooks and melodies, all amid a frisson of fuzz. It’s electric, efficient, an instant classic, and the best local record I heard in 2014.

These records have set an awfully high bar for 2015, but something tells me I’ll have the same grin on my face when I make this list next December. I’m already looking forward to it.

Weld artist-in-residence Paul Cordes Wilm will be presenting in character as Vincent Van Gogh at The Fountys, an artistic awards show.

It’s a small miracle that Space One Eleven even exists at all. Founded in 1986, the visual arts nonprofit has weathered years of urban malaise, apathy toward contemporary art, political squabbling over arts funding and more, yet has not only survived, but enriched the cultural life of the city for 25 years in the heart of downtown Birmingham.

Throughout its nearly 30-year history, Space One Eleven has had to be creative with finding funding, and on Friday, Dec. 12, they’ll be benefiting from an especially unusual fundraiser. The Fountys, held at Bottletree and hosted by aspiring edutainment mogul Max Rykov, is a benefit to match both the creativity and the sense of playfulness that have long defined Space One Eleven.

Taking its name from Marcel Duchamp’s infamous Dadaist work Fountain — a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” — the Fountys is a mock awards ceremony featuring Birmingham residents dressing up as famous works of art and taking home prizes in such categories as Most Confusing to the General Public, Most Politically Conscious and Most Poignant Portrayal of the Human Condition. If you’ve ever wanted to see one of your friends dress up like Michelangelo’s David or Caravaggio’s Medusa, here’s your chance.

“It’s like the Oscars, basically,” said Rykov, the event’s MC. “Two presenters go up, dressed in character, and present the nominees for the categories, then the winner comes up and gets their tiny gold urinal.” Many of Rykov’s edutainment-based events have been rooted in a high concept; in this case, it was, “How funny would it be for Mona Lisa to be handing a tiny urinal to Van Gogh?”, which truly is one of history’s great what-if scenarios.

Beyond the inherent comedy of a tiny golden urinal, however, there’s a real educational element to the Fountys. “It’s appropriate, because Duchamp’s Fountain is, perhaps more so than any other work of art, part of the discussion of what constitutes art,” Rykov said. It’s a discussion that Rykov, himself a layman in art history, has come to appreciate. Referring to Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky, he said, “To someone who isn’t familiar with it, it just looks like a bunch of squiggles,” but Rykov has come to understand that abstract art is like “being a magician in a way, and letting people see another world.”

Providing a window into another world has been one of the critical factors in Space One Eleven’s success over the years, especially considering the nonprofit’s rocky beginnings.

“Back then, this [neighborhood] was like an urban desert,” said cofounder Peter Prinz. “A Jimmie Hale homeless shelter was on the corner, a plasma bank was next door to us — the only good thing that I can think of was that Massey’s Mercantile was still open and next to us. … When we finally made the move, all of a sudden, people were saying, ‘Northside of Birmingham? No way. You’re gonna get killed down there.’”

After losing their core of art students during the move to downtown in 1989, Prinz and fellow cofounder Anne Arrasmith saw their fortunes recover because of their connection to the neighborhood. “A bunch of kids started coming by and asking, ‘Hey, what are y’all doing?’” Prinz recalled. “And we said, ‘We’re just artists,’ and they said, ‘Well, we want to be artists too.’ And so the teaching turned to completely different demographics. And of course, it was free. We had to figure out how to get supplies, paint, paper. And we ran out of everything too quickly and had to replace it somehow.”

Despite the initial cost of making the transition from teaching affluent Over the Mountain children to teaching kids from Metropolitan Gardens — housing projects that were, in the 1990s, located in one of the very poorest ZIP codes in the country — Space One Eleven’s relationship with inner city kids paid enormous dividends.

Culture wars led by Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms in the early ‘90s decisively changed the direction of funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, one of Space One Eleven’s most important sources of grant money. As the NEA shifted its focus toward subsidizing arts education, Space One Eleven had to adapt, growing its educational programs for neighborhood kids organically.

More than a marriage of convenience, however, Space One Eleven’s educational programming was a home away from home for many of the kids. In collaboration with the Center for Urban Mission, 13 kids became Citizen Artists who worked at Space One Eleven every summer for five to seven years. One of those artists, Derrick Franklin, has since gone on to become an architect, and now sits on Space One Eleven’s board of directors.

“There a lot of kids like that who, years later, we find out what it meant for them to be in this program, or having an artist talk to them, or just seeing someone being able to create and thinking, ‘Hey, I can do that too,’” Prinz said.

Space One Eleven’s roots in the neighborhood allowed it to tackle its most ambitious project to date, which was the five-year, $500,000 Urban Mural project, replacing the decrepit east wall of Boutwell Auditorium with a picture of a dragon. Consisting of 28,000 tiles made of Alabama clay and weighing 112 tons, the project not only relied on the work of local kids — not to mention their parents, some of whom learned artistic skills they’d never had an opportunity to discover while also being paid for their work — but also their imagination.

“We talked about [Dutch artist Piet] Mondrian, trying to tie in a lot of art history into this thing, and the kids didn’t like that,” Prinz said. “What you see now is drawn from Chinese mythology, I guess — ‘Before you slay a dragon, make it beautiful.’ It was about Birmingham and the ugly past it has had, to put something beautiful up there to celebrate the great things. Bricks can be bad when they’re thrown, but bricks can be positive when you build something with them.”

Birmingham is still a source of inspiration for Prinz, who originally hails from Germany. “We’re always trying to use the industrial heritage, as well as the civil rights heritage, of Birmingham in our educational programming, as well as our exhibitions’ themes, talking about some of those issues.”

Despite the nonprofit’s connection to downtown and its adaptation to shifting policies, Prinz says that Space One Eleven’s core identity has never changed: “We didn’t reinvent ourselves. We always were a visual arts organization and we always exhibited quality art — we want to keep that bar high.”

At this year’s Artwalk, Space One Eleven featured the works of artist and activist Steve Lambert.

That touches on another faintly miraculous quality about Space One Eleven’s survival in the Deep South: its commitment to progressive-minded, politically oriented programming. The art shown at Space One Eleven reliably takes aim at targets like racism, xenophobia, misogyny and homophobia — not to incite controversy, Prinz says, but to address contemporary issues. On one occasion, an outré exhibition by artist Larry Anderson in support of gay rights even drew a warning from the FBI to take the show down, lest Space One Eleven become a target for extremists like Eric Rudolph.

Despite Space One Eleven’s long, unlikely history in Birmingham, Prinz says that the nonprofit still has inroads to make into the community, which in many ways seems to be catching up to the forward-thinking example set by the nonprofit. In addition to raising money, there are hopes that the Fountys will also raise more awareness about what Prinz calls “the best-kept secret in Birmingham.”

Like Space One Eleven itself, the Fountys will be an easygoing introduction into the world of art. “This is for a very sophisticated crowd. You have to have at least a master’s to get into it,” Rykov joked. “The point of it is, it’s a fun way to actually educate people about art and art history. … When you think of an art museum, it has a certain rigid feel to it. Some people might be intimidated by it. And this is a very un-intimidating environment.”

For an organization dedicated to removing walls between people, nothing could be more appropriate.

The Fountys will take place at Bottletree Café on Dec. 12 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door.

When Sarah Heath first moved from Kansas to Birmingham in 2006, she was astonished at the lack of activity in its city center. “I remember driving around downtown and telling my friend that it was like the shell of a city,” Heath recalled. “It was like a city lived here once inside of all these buildings, and then it moved on, and the shell was abandoned.”

As an undergraduate studying sculpture at the University of Kansas, Heath had first come to Birmingham the year prior for the inaugural Student Cupola Competition at the National Conference of Cast Iron Art, held at Sloss Furnaces. After winning an award for the most innovative student cupola, Heath became an artist-in-residence with Sloss Metal Arts, becoming an unlikely resident of the Magic City. Even more unlikely, Heath has gotten to the heart of the city’s cultural resurgence with her new exhibition AD ASTRA.

Arriving in the wee hours of the city’s oft-cited renaissance, Heath has witnessed firsthand the spontaneous growth of the Birmingham arts scene, as well as the renewed energy in a city center that once seemed like an abandoned shell. Through it all, one constant has been the positivity and support of Birmingham’s artistic community.

One of Heath’s foremost relationships has been with Merrilee Challiss, owner of Bottletree Café and an accomplished visual artist in her own right. When Heath’s residency at Sloss concluded, Challiss paved the way for her to remain in Birmingham. “I’ll never forget what Merrilee said to me,” Heath said. “‘If keeping cool people like you in Birmingham means giving you a job, then you’ve got it.’ That was seven, eight years ago, and I still bartend at Bottletree on Friday nights.”

Heath technically worked at the Bottletree while enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Georgia, allowing her to maintain a connection to Birmingham. Three years of grad school at a prestigious sculpture program were important for Heath, but she still expresses profound relief at the support she finds in Birmingham in the wake of a sometimes cynical atmosphere in Athens.

“Coming back to Birmingham after graduate school was the best decision I could’ve made, honestly,” Heath said. In addition to the practical advantages of working in Birmingham — studio rents are astonishingly cheap, as are raw materials to sculpt with in a post-industrial city — Heath is effusive on the subject of the many artists who have helped to define Birmingham art over the last decade. From the brilliance of sculptor Brad Morton, to the mentoring influence of visual artist Doug Baulos, to the generosity of “art saint” Wendy Jarvis — whose Bare Hands Gallery was the first space to exhibit Heath’s work not owned by Heath’s own mother — Heath is never at a loss for nice things to say about Birmingham artists.

Photo by David Garrett.

Nowadays, Heath’s art is in considerably higher demand than when she first arrived in town. Named as Birmingham’s 2014 Rising Artist at Magic City Art Connection, Heath currently has a lovely, emotionally affecting show on display at T-Rex Tiny Gallery in Crestwood. Her exhibition — taking its name, AD ASTRA, from the Kansas state motto of Ad astra per aspera, “To the stars through difficulties” — is one of the finest art shows of the year in Birmingham.

AD ASTRA is a set of three thematically linked pieces, including a flock of plastic birds, a mixed media triptych with feathered, quasi-mythological figures, and a set of repurposed photographs from both historic and contemporary Birmingham set in wood blocks with LED backlights. The show is not only deeply personal, showing the character of Heath’s practice, but also resonant for Birmingham as a whole, as it offers a hopeful yet wistful vision of a city torn between its past and its future.

As is common among Birmingham artists, Heath’s work in AD ASTRA blends a conceptually rich theme with a lovely aesthetic and intricate detail. “I have some obsessive tendencies,” Heath said of her work. “Some of my art kind of reflects my need to do something in repetition hundreds of times. Visually, I think what my art represents is a desire to meditate on something simple.”

The simplicity of Heath’s approach is one of the factors making it so appealing, lending AD ASTRA an unmistakably handmade quality. “What’s really important to me in my practice is clean craft, honing a skill,” Heath said. “I can’t let go of my attachment to clean craft — to craftsmanship, to being not just an artist, but an artisan. If you’re going to build something, you’re going to build it right.”

An ongoing theme in Heath’s practice is finding serene refuge in simplicity and skill, a refreshing change of pace from the echo chamber of an art world that tends to favor the audacious and the glib. “I still make work that I want to look beautiful. Art doesn’t have to look beautiful — I might even be considered trite because I aim for beauty — but I do! That’s me. I don’t want to apologize for that,” Heath said.

Photo by David Garrett.

Citing Oscar Wilde’s statement that “sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism,” Heath expressed her fear at describing herself as a sentimental artist, but the sincerity of AD ASTRA’s emotions are hard to miss. Even in an exhibition as small as this one, there’s an unmistakably Romantic sense that something lost might still be found again, that old wounds might heal, that old wrongs might still be set right. Sepia-toned photographs from the Civil Rights Movement hang across the gallery from phoenix-like figures in a triptych called Everything Is Reborn — with beautifully lit shapes of birds in flight between them — and the conflicted emotions that result are the nuanced and affecting combination this reemerging city deserves.

“I think that there’s such a strong sense of history here, and it’s really touching,” Heath said. “The first time that I went to the Civil Rights Institute, I cried three separate times. … What I’ve watched happen since 2005, when I first came here, and 2006, when I moved here, that’s inspiring. To watch something be reborn, that’s so exciting. I am completely inspired by the tenacity of this city to keep going and just reinvent itself.”

With the benefit of an outsider’s perspective – along with a wealth of honed skill, natural talent and affection for her subject – Heath has accomplished a rare feat. In the course of a personal exhibition, the artist speaks to the challenges of a city that’s trying to take wing while it holds onto its roots.

T-Rex Tiny Gallery’s hours are by appointment. To make an appointment, contact Sarah Heath at sarahbheath@gmail.com. AD ASTRA’s closing ceremony will take place from 6-9 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 13.

Nobody’s ever gone broke overestimating rock ‘n roll’s ability to rediscover itself. One of the salient trends in indie rock over the past decade has been a genre-wide rediscovery of new wave music, leading to a lot of acts – Twin Shadow, M83, and a horde of singer-songwriters blowing up their sound come to mind – becoming ‘80s pastiches. Others, like Dent May or Mac DeMarco, look a little further back to glean the best parts of ‘70s A.M. radio.

For Nashville instrumental duo Steelism, who are playing Good People Brewing Company on Oct. 30, the gold vein stretches even further back. Building from a surprisingly ample framework of guitar and pedal steel, the band’s sound is a strange brew of classic country and western music, Spaghetti western soundtracks, surf rock and electric blues. The many elements constituting Steelism’s sound are something borrowed, but the synthesis is something new.

The band is a collaboration between longtime Nashville session musicians Jeremy Fetzer (an American on guitar) and Spencer Cullum (an Englishman on pedal steel). They’ve collaborated with some of the best alt-country acts in the game right now – including Jonny Fritz and Caitlin Rose, with whom the Steelism duo first got to know each other on a UK tour – and on their new LP 615 to FAME, they make a convincing argument that sidemen deserve their day in the limelight.

Recorded in part at Muscle Shoals’ renowned FAME Studios and released on Single Lock Records, 615 to FAME appears to possess few elements of the famous Muscle Shoals sound outside of its knack for ready grooves. Instead of the muddier sound that’s become synonymous with the region, Steelism’s approach is relentlessly fastidious, as each instrument feels like it’s exactly in its right place in the mix.

With some bands, that clean sound might pose a problem, but it works perfectly for Steelism’s defiantly retrospective, cinematic music. Without uttering a single syllable to elaborate on the storytelling, each song on 615 to FAME paints a distinct scene with meticulous detail. The duo’s facility with a wide variety of styles – Ennio Morricone operatics on the opener “Cat’s Eye Ring”, Tarantino-ready grooves on “The Landlocked Surfer”, Glen Campbell-style country on “Tears of Isabella” and, in the highlight of the record, krautrock’s motorik beat on the transcendent “Marfa Lights” – allows them to improvise on the audience’s expectations about each genre while keeping themselves well out of firing distance of accusations of ripping anyone off.

While it may seem a little off-kilter to compare an instrumental band to one of the most lyrically opaque and self-referential acts in rock history, Steelism evoke nobody so much as Steely Dan, at least to this listener’s way of thinking. Like Steely Dan, Steelism’s sound is discernibly fussed-over and studio-oriented, and both acts are concerned with economical storytelling as much as they are with showcasing their musicians’ considerable chops. The most overt similarity, though, is the bands’ shared sense of humor, which constantly veers between clever irony and outright goofiness.

On All Hallows’ Eve Eve, Steelism will be the main attraction for a Halloween-themed night of fun at Good People. It’s hard to say what exactly that will mean in practice, but in light of the fact that Steelism are one of the best bands in America when it comes to evoking a mood – not to mention the fact that they’ll be providing a new version of the Adam West Batman theme song for a documentary on Willie Perry, Birmingham’s own Batman – it’s safe to say that you could do a lot worse for a spooky night of music, costumes and fun.

Steelism will perform at Good People Brewing Company at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 30.

On the evening of Oct. 23, the bohemian environs of Bottletree Café will play host to a cosmopolitan event benefiting the Birmingham International Center. Globally Challenged, a sequel to a geography bee last year at the Avondale venue, will feature local contestants testing their cultural literacy for the edification, amusement and schadenfreude of the audience.

Unlike the more straightforward geography bee of last year’s vintage, this year’s Globally Challenged will feature teams – grouped by continent, with each contestant representing a different country – playing on a game board they have to progress along. True to realist foreign policy, the leading continent after the team round will balkanize back into separate countries for the final round, with each player competing against his former allies in a double-elimination format.

“Globally Challenged presents a chance for Birminghamians to show off their knowledge of world culture through friendly and humor-filled competition,” said Max Rykov, local young person, aspiring edutainment mogul and event emcee. “Audience members and competitors will be exposed to the best of our planet’s music, art, literature and more while interacting with one another in this participatory event. There will be plenty of opportunity for the brightest, bravest and luckiest to win fantastic prizes.”

The night will begin with a rendition of the superlatively difficult “Nations of the World” song from The Animaniacs, sung by the superlatively gifted Anita Clark. Other performances in the olio will include belly dancing from Aziza of Birmingham, flamenco dancing from Corazon Flamenco and music from Colombian guitarist Holguer Pimiento.

The evening’s trio of judges, operating with the icy impartiality of the Hague, will be Carole Griffin of Continental Bakery Downtown and Chez Lulu; Eric Fournier, geography professor at Samford University; and Rosie O’Beirne of UAB Digital Media.

Proceeds from the event will go to the Birmingham International Center, a nonprofit organization whose mission it is to promote global business development, including global education, in the state of Alabama.

Globally Challenged will return to Bottletree on Thursday, Oct. 23. Tickets are $20 to compete, $10 to attend. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the event begins at 8.

To put it simply, Holy Youth are the reason I write about local music. Coming out of college, I had great expectations that I’d be able to cover Birmingham’s music scene — something I had almost no familiarity with, for the record — for Weld, but it wasn’t until I saw the poppy Montevallo four-piece open for the Babies at Bottletree in December of 2012 that this particular project seemed even remotely feasible.

What struck me most that night was the atmosphere the band was able to create, condensing staccato guitar riffs, catchy melodies and driving rhythms into undulating waves of sound that the listener would only be too happy to get lost in. Until then, I had no idea that an Alabama band could sound that good. Whatever misplaced notions I had of scene kids exchanging poorly labeled mixtapes in hushed reverence evaporated in the power pop magic of that show.

Accessibility is the name of the game on Holy Youth’s upcoming self-titled LP, which collects the band’s best songs from prior EPs and assembles them, along with some new material, into just under a half-hour of bliss. Every bit of the giddy energy from Holy Youth’s live show is intact on the LP, which still finds the time to work in sober self-reflection and thoughts on relationships into its thematic framework.

Holy Youth are the flagship band of Happenin Records, an indie micro-label based out of Montevallo. Holy Youth frontman Chris McCauley is the cofounder of Happenin, which boasts some of the best acts currently playing in Alabama, including scene regulars Plains and Drew Price’s Bermuda Triangle. Whatever the style each band plays in — ‘70s-style glam rock, psychedelic experimentation and melancholy dream-pop are all well-represented — nearly all of them are united by a terrific ear for what makes pop music work.

Looking at it that way, Holy Youth may not be the label’s most prolific act, but they’re probably the most definitive one. Every song is upbeat, immediate and radio-friendly, with warm guitar tones that are always assertive, rather than aggressive; welcoming, rather than intimidating. The record’s more jagged edges (“Black Holes”, “Structured Violence”) always feel like they’re moments away from beautiful resolutions. If you’ve been waiting for a band that finds a happy medium between the Ramones, the dBs and the Archies, you’re in luck.

The record’s sound is aided immensely by high-quality production, which has been as much a staple of Happenin Records’ catalog as it has been for Woodlawn label Communicating Vessels. Songs that didn’t really need the homemade quality of earlier EPs have been remastered — and remixed, in some cases — and generally expanded massively on the LP. Each enormous element, from the sunny guitars to the high-pitched vocals, becomes another texture to assemble into a poppy, maximalist mosaic.

Critically, though, while the band’s style may come off as sugary, its substance is never saccharine — or worse, just plain dumb. As much as the record focuses on immediate engagement for the listener, it rewards subsequent listens with subtle production touches — mainly beautiful snippets of backing vocals deep in the mix — as well as moments of earnestness smuggled into the runaway momentum of each song.

The record begins with “Radio Fuzz,” a staple of the band’s live show that laments the unimaginative quality of both pop love songs and the narrator’s own romantic ideals. Holy Youth’s willingness to complicate those adolescent ideals of love means delving into the frailties of relationships in the real world, which all too often don’t play out the way they do in love songs. In lieu of outright fights, there are unspoken tensions that are just as toxic, poisoning the relationship at the root (“I’m a Liar”).

Unlike some other upbeat records about difficult or moldering relationships — here’s looking at you, Elvis Costello — Holy Youth doesn’t lay the blame at someone else’s doorstep. Take the album’s most vulnerable (and best) track, “Empty Mind”, a brutal dissection of a relationship in its final days that just happens to be surrounded by the album’s most unstoppable songwriting. “My faults are real, and I can’t change,” McCauley sings. “Now I’m beginning to see that I was wrong, and you were right, but now you’re gone.” Without the emotional layers, “Empty Mind” would be a perfect summer song; in context, though, it’s a cathartic pop masterpiece.

In the wake of song after song of difficult soul-searching, though, the album resolves joyously with another Holy Youth standby, the paean to pacifism “Don’t Fight Back”. An ode to the virtues of grinning and bearing it, “Don’t Fight Back” is as catchy as a song about serenely accepting a whooping needs to be. In context, though, it’s also a perfect bookend to “Radio Fuzz”; after finding out that pop songs about love are happy and uncomplicated for a reason, the album decides to roll with the punches of real-life relationships with a smile. Summer will be in the rear-view mirror by the time Holy Youth is released on Oct. 14, but the optimism’s not going anywhere.

Mi’a Callens served as the model for the cover of belladonna’s debut issue. Photo by Will Hamilton Photography.

On the evening of Monday, Oct. 6, Continental Bakery Downtown will play host to a cabaret seemingly on loan from late-‘20s Berlin, with an olio including a world-class pianist, dancers, spoken-word poetry and a fashion show, as well as lovely art nouveau posters. Despite its Old World flair, the event, Belladonna Live!, is a benefit in service of a vibrant new multimedia collaborative called Project Veracity.

Starting at 8 p.m., the Belladonna Live! cabaret will feature inventive dancing from Melissa Word and William-Michael Cooper & Co.; music from R&B singer-songwriter Gabriel Tajeu; spoken word performances from Sharrif Simmons and John Paul Taylor; magic from Kevin Sanderson; juggling from local vaudevillian Scott Autrey; live improv comedy from UglyBaby; and that’s only part of the bill. Attendees should note that dressing up in fancy Jazz Age-style clothing is encouraged.

Project Veracity incorporates the many arts on display at Belladonna Live! into an ambitious set of goals. The first – and currently, the most visible – is belladonna, a biannual magazine focusing on fashion, the arts and profiles of creative-minded people. Other goals include founding an independent publishing house, a video platform called Veraci-TV, and a “community-interactive resource and mental wellness initiative” called ArtHeart Connect, according to the collaborative’s website.

Those grandiose designs popped up organically, if not accidentally, according to founder Maacah Davis.

“It started off with me asking friends if they’d like to have a fairy photo shoot, and people agreed, as people tend to,” Davis said with a laugh. “I am very lucky to be surrounded by that kind of person. And then I realized that I had nowhere to put this fashion shoot. And Birmingham has this budding fashion scene, you know? It’s a little small, but it’s growing. We have designers and photographers and models and they’re all building their portfolios, but what are they building them for? I wanted somewhere to put all of my stuff.”

For Davis, that somewhere became belladonna, whose handsomely appointed summer issue debuted with elegant photography of people dressed as fairies, building around a “Midsummer Night’s Debut” theme in-between profiles of artists, designers and social justice activists.

belladonna is one facet of Project Veracity, which is defined above all by youthful exuberance. To UAB student (and freshly minted 20-year-old) Davis, the collaborative’s amateurism is an opportunity, not a drawback.

“Except for [photographer] Lynsey Weatherspoon, who is a goddess in her own right, we were all amateurs,” Davis said of belladonna’s first issue. “We’re everywhere. People are like, ‘Where do you find these people?’ Literally, everywhere. They’re students, they’re down the street, they’re at coffee shops, and they want a chance to create.

“It’s okay that we don’t know what we’re doing, because we get to try everything, and we can do it well,” she added. “I’m finding that if I just take baby steps, everything becomes a lot easier.”

Davis’ own background as an African immigrant – one who grew up doubly an outsider, being both black and Jewish – lends her a sense of excitement when figuring out her identity, and that magic of personal epiphany shines through Project Veracity’s many ambitions. “That’s what my life is about – that’s what everyone’s life is about, I guess: figuring out who you are,” Davis said. “This city’s a pretty great place to do it. That’s why I’m so excited to work with people from here.”

Project Veracity is rooted in the Magic City, with only members of belladonna’s writing staff hailing from outside of Alabama. Fortunately for everyone involved with the collaborative, they’re arriving on the scene just as the city is beginning to brim again with youthful optimism, gradually providing a rooftop for all that Millennial energy to sound its barbaric yawp.

Davis has lived in Birmingham for eight years, and is thrilled to watch the city undergo a self-discovery that mirrors her own. Whether it’s rooted in institutions as venerable and baroque as the Alabama and Lyric Theatres or in brand-new art collectives drawn from former ASFA students, Birmingham’s much-touted cultural renaissance reaches its fullest bloom drawing on a colorful tapestry of identities. Although still developing its platform, Project Veracity has the right combination of skill and idealism to weave itself into a dream of a more diverse, creative Birmingham.

“Birmingham is – I feel like I’m lucky to have arrived when I did,” Davis said. “It’s not too far back where it would be really awkward for an immigrant black girl to be doing this, and it’s not too far forward, where everything’s already established. This is where we grow. … This is where artists are developing. This is the period of time to take advantage of what’s happened. This particular period of time is golden. It’s ideal.”

Slavs and Tatars, “Rahlé for Richard,” 2014. Courtesy of the artists, The Third Line and the Birmingham Museum of Art.

On the morning of Saturday, Sept. 20, the Birmingham Museum of Art (BMA) will host ART PAPERS LIVE, a special collaboration with the eponymous Atlanta-based arts magazine featuring a talk from arts collective Slavs and Tatars. Birmingham may seem like a strange place to have a contemporary arts-based conversation about the power of language, but Slavs and Tatars should offer an intriguing new perspective on the city’s past, present and future.

Founded in 2006 as a book club, Slavs and Tatars evolved into a two-person arts collective focusing on the languages of the 300 or so cultures east of the Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China. In the process, the collective examines the ways that different empires – whether they write in Arabic, Turkish, Latin or Cyrillic – impose their will on colonized peoples, determining the course of their culture through jarring shifts in the very composition of their language.

In an interview with Middle Eastern arts forum Ibraaz, Slavs and Tatars noted as an example three politicized shifts in language among the Soviet Union’s empire, between Latinizing under Lenin, replacing that with Cyrillic language under Stalin, and then reverting back to Latinized language after the fall of the Soviet Union. “You have this very tragic situation where three generations speak the same language, but can’t read or write the same book,” Slavs and Tatars said. “People become immigrants within their own countries, in some sense.”

As dour as conversations like those may seem on the surface, Slavs and Tatars’ practice is rooted in humor, which boils down complex ideas into playful, approachable discussions. “When you’re devoted to an area of the world as we are,” Slavs and Tatars said in the interview, “you have to understand that for most people – whether they’re in the Middle East or in the West – it’s an area that strikes them as obscure and remote. Humor is a way – in the same way that celebration, hospitality and sometimes pop culture are – to meet our audience halfway, so it’s a generosity.”

In addition to the olive branch of humor, Birmingham’s own history of colonization – most notably in the city’s historical relationship with U.S. Steel – should provide a tangible link to the seemingly distant peoples of Eurasia that Slavs and Tatars focus on. More to the point, the city’s turbulent history with civil rights and the politics of identity should make the connections much more immediate than it would be in most towns.

“Part of what’s exciting about bringing artists in from elsewhere is that they’ll have a fresh perspective on a history that everyone here is already familiar with, and it’ll hopefully help people to see it another way,” said Wassan Al-Khudhairi, the BMA’s curator of modern and contemporary art.

In addition to her collaboration with ART PAPERS, Al-Khudhairi located a collector who allowed the museum to borrow a Slavs and Tatars work in time for their talk. That piece, Rahlé for Richard, illustrates much of the collective’s passions in an extremely approachable way. The piece is a rahlé – a bookstand that holds religious texts at mosques – painted to look like a shouting mouth, complete with a long red tongue snaking out of it. Instead of meekly accepting these received words, Slavs and Tatars have their rahlé scream defiance, provoking a gut-level reaction that lays the groundwork for a more intellectual conversation about the nature of power, language and identity.

Critically, Al-Khudhairi is matching this piece from Slavs and Tatars with the museum’s own collection and local identity. “What I think is interesting is to look at their practice, which focuses on a certain part of the world, and how that can really complement conversations that we’re having at the museum. In relation to this in the gallery, [Rahlé for Richard] is going to be placed next to works by Lorna Simpson and Glenn Ligon, two artists that use language heavily in their work.”

The Lorna Simpson piece, Tense, features two images of a black woman’s back, with a number of tenses – past, past imperfect, present imperfect, past perfect, future perfect – suggesting the myriad possibilities of progress and its thorny relationship to history. Glenn Ligon’s companion work is a stenciled recitation, in oil crayon, of the prologue to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, quickly blurring into illegibility.

“These two artists talking about identity and being black in America by employing language, and then having this piece [from Slavs and Tatars] – it’s a different place, but it’s still employing and thinking about the politics of language – I think that’s the introduction of what I’m interested in thinking about here at the museum,” Al-Khudhairi said. “How can we bring in other voices to help us understand the works we have in the collection, as well as put artists in conversation with other artists who normally maybe wouldn’t be talking to each other?”

As the art collective told Ibraaz, “We call it the metaphysical splits in the sense not of the splits of the leg, but the splits of the mind. How can you bring together in one page, one register, one voice, two things which are considered to be antithetical?”

If not exactly antithetical, the colonization of the Eurasian peoples and the Civil Rights Movement aren’t commonly linked together, but the combination of the two in this talk should provide fascinating insights into both subjects. Al-Khudhairi acknowledges the off-putting complexities of delving into the shifting phonemes, graphemes and letters of languages most Americans have no familiarity with, but heartfelt explorations of identity and place should ring especially true in Birmingham.

“We are trying to do interesting things and have interesting conversations in Birmingham right now,” Al-Khudhairi said. “It’s just a real, human conversation with people about art, not a glossy event that’s all about ticket sales. We want to be a platform for new conversations to happen, and find new ways to talk about Birmingham’s history.”

ART PAPERS LIVE will take place at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 20 at the Birmingham Museum of Art. The event is free to attend. For more information, call (205) 254-2565.

]]>https://weldbham.com/blog/2014/09/17/the-power-of-language-birmingham-museum-art/feed/0Birmingham’s White Knighthttps://weldbham.com/blog/2014/09/09/birminghams-white-knight-willie-perry/
https://weldbham.com/blog/2014/09/09/birminghams-white-knight-willie-perry/#respondWed, 10 Sep 2014 01:44:00 +0000http://weldbham.com/?p=18002Rescuing the memory of a man with an uncommon devotion to the common good.

In the ’70s and ’80s, Birmingham had its own real-life superhero. Photo courtesy of Lee Shook.

The city of Birmingham had little to cheer for in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Years of well-earned bad press and the loss of the steel industry sent the Magic City spiraling into decline, suffering by comparison to the ascendant star of Atlanta, the “City Too Busy to Hate.” But in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Birmingham had something no other city in America could claim: it had a real-life superhero.

By day, Willie Perry was the general manager of J.F. Day & Co., a window-making shop in Lakeview. By night, he was Batman, cruising the highways and byways of Birmingham in a souped-up 1971 Ford Thunderbird he called the Rescue Ship, complete with a sign reading, “Will help anyone in distress.”

For years, Perry helped people of all ages, races and creeds in all parts of Birmingham, only stopping when he tragically died of carbon monoxide poisoning – in a cruel irony, Perry accidentally inhaled fumes from the Rescue Ship itself, left running on a cold night in the garage he called the Batcave – in early 1985. After his death, Perry’s legacy lived on in the Rescue Ship, but the car has suffered from years of mistreatment, neglect and, for an uncertain amount of time, misplacement.

As of the last several months, however, things are finally looking up for the Rescue Ship and the possible revival of a critical part of Birmingham culture. Local filmmaker Lee Shook, working tirelessly with Perry’s widow and daughter, has been leading a campaign to locate and restore the Rescue Ship for years. Now, eight years after Shook first conceived the project, it looks like Birmingham will finally have the opportunity to restore the memory of one of its most extraordinary citizens.

The White Knight of Birmingham

Like all good superheroes, Willie Perry’s adventures as a helmeted crusader had an origin story. Unfortunately, like so many superheroes, it was sparked by a tragedy.

“Years ago, my dad heard about this lady that’d had a flat, and some guys pulled up to help her,” recalled Marquetta Hill, Perry’s daughter. “But instead of helping her, they raped her. So, being the person he is, I think that has a lot to do with why he did what he did. That way, if people were stranded and without assistance, they didn’t have to worry about whether they’d be molested or harmed. He’d have his ID on him and let people know he was just there to help.”

After early attempts to help people in different personas – notably, as the Spaceman who rode a tasseled motor scooter – Perry found his calling as Batman. Donning a maroon-and-white helmet and a burgundy jumpsuit with white trim, the skinny, soft-spoken father and husband became a superheroic Good Samaritan, driving around in a vehicle that was the perfect ice-breaker.

“He’s not some guy that was out there screaming and yelling, a forceful personality,” said Lee Shook. “He used the car to speak for him. He was just a truly kind human being. I think that vehicle gave him a lot of power. That was the whole idea of being the Batman, of embracing a character that’s maybe not you. In this case, there’s Willie Perry, who’s the manager of a window-making shop in Lakeview…and come five o’clock, he puts on his helmet. … It was like having a talisman put around his neck.”

The Rescue Ship itself was a marvelous piece of machinery, a gaudy tribute to Perry’s technical know-how, sense of flair and desire for adventure. The Rescue Ship was painted maroon, gold and white and covered in flashing lights, presenting a funky counterpoint to the Batmobile, the vehicle of choice for the squarest of superheroes. In short, according to Shook, “the car looks like Parliament-Funkadelic on wheels.”

Perry converted the Rescue Ship himself, and he stocked it with a host of wonders that might have seemed like gadgets in the early ‘80s. The Rescue Ship boasted an Atari, a TV, a record player, an electronic address finder, a telephone, a toaster, a Coke dispenser and much more, in addition to a running faucet and spare gas and water to help people with broken-down cars.

In stark contrast to Bruce Wayne’s millions, Perry’s work was supported by an average workingman’s salary from J.F. Day. But when the Rescue Ship traveled the streets and highways of Birmingham helping people on the side of the road, fixing tires and busted parts, all services were free of charge.

Though best remembered for helping people with car trouble, Perry would also ferry people wherever they needed to go, including those who were too tipsy to drive home from the Nick. In one case, Perry’s passenger was a 100-year-old man, whose last wishes included taking a ride in the Rescue Ship. Though Perry was a fixture in Southside and around his home base of West End, he traveled to all parts of Birmingham to help anyone in distress.

Perry would help anyone regardless of their skin color, but it’s worth noting that he was also a reassuring presence to the young and the old alike. For children in the community, Perry – known to most only as Batman – offered free rides, trips to Burger King and an opportunity to spend some time in a tricked-out wonderland of a car. For elderly residents, Perry provided consistent rides to the pharmacy and doctor’s appointments, as well as a friendly face to talk to on the porch.

For his efforts, Perry was featured on the early reality TV show That’s Incredible!, where he was lauded for his record as a Good Samaritan. In 1982, Mayor Richard Arrington declared Aug. 3 Willie Perry Day in recognition of his commitment to community service. Due to the national recognition he received, Perry showed up on Michael Jackson’s radar, and the King of Pop took a spin in the Rescue Ship during a stop in Birmingham while on tour.

As busy as he was with his two careers, Perry never lost sight of his family, according to his daughter. When asked what it was like growing up with a superhero for a father, Hill replied, “Oh, he was just Dad to me. I remember growing up that he always…helped others. His motto was, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ And he mimicked that even in our household. I guess that I can say that my dad taught me how to be a lady – he just showed me how a real man’s supposed to treat a woman. My mother didn’t need for anything; he spoiled her. He was just a great dad. I loved him so much – he was my best friend. I could share anything with him, and I didn’t have to worry about being scared.”

Perry’s unanimously glowing reputation from friends, family and strangers alike only heightens the tragedy of his death. Only days after helping four University of Tennessee students purchase rooms at a hotel when they were stranded in Birmingham during a snowfall, Perry died at the age of 44, according to BhamWiki.

“He was the backbone of the company,” said Tom Patton, sales manager of J.F. Day, in a Birmingham News report following Perry’s death. “We’re all just in shock – he spends his life helping people and then he turns up dead, all alone.” A contemporaneous report from The Birmingham Post-Herald quotes Mayor Arrington calling Perry “a special blessing to the city of Birmingham. He was one of the few people who disregarded himself completely in the name of others.”

“I didn’t realize how important my dad was in the city of Birmingham until he passed,” Hill said. “That’s when people from all over – white, black, anyone – came and shared with us stories of what my dad did. We weren’t rich, we were just average, but he shared, and because he shared, God blessed him. God blesses you so that you can be a blessing. … That’s why I can’t allow his legacy to go unnoticed.”

The Rescue Ship resided for a time at the Alabama State Fairgrounds. Photo by Lee Shook.

Rescuing the Rescue Ship

After Perry’s passing in 1985, the City of Birmingham purchased the Rescue Ship for $15,000 from the Perry family. Originally housed at the Southern Museum of Flight, the car was eventually moved out to the Alabama State Fairgrounds, which is where Lee Shook found it after deciding he wanted to make a documentary about Perry’s life and legacy.

Growing up in Mountain Brook, Shook saw Perry in parades and during his rounds on the interstate, helping people on the side of the road. After going to New York for film school, Shook returned with the ambition to document Perry’s life’s work, and he planned to use the Rescue Ship to stand in for the late Perry in the film.

Finally seeing the car, however, was an unpleasant surprise. “When I found it, the car wouldn’t run at all,” Shook recalled. “Nobody had tried to take it out for a spin to keep the engine fresh. The tires were flat. The door [to the display case holding the car] was wide open, and there was graffiti on the car. And it was sad to me to see this amazing, singular piece of machinery, and such a unique part of Birmingham’s cultural history, and I thought, ‘Something needs to be done about this.’”

Shook’s subsequent letter-writing campaign, working in tandem with Hill, convinced the city to relocate the car from the Fairgrounds. Since 2009, the Rescue Ship has been sitting under a tarp in a storage garage, and it hasn’t been maintained for years.

With more time and money to devote to the project, Shook began the documentary process again within the last year. With 2014 marking the 75th anniversary of the debut of Batman in Detective Comics #27, Shook mustered his resources to make the documentary – tentatively titled Smiles Per Gallon – timely. The project currently involves several notable contributors, with 2threefive, who make the Made in the Magic City series, serving as the production crew, Yellowhammer Creative handling design and marketing, and Nashville-based duo Steelism composing a new take on the Batman theme song.

With a release date originally planned for Aug. 3 of this year – Willie Perry Day – Shook’s plans stalled when the city had difficulty tracking down the Rescue Ship. The recent involvement of Councilor Sheila Tyson, however, has both the documentary and the Rescue Ship itself back on the right track.

Tyson, whose office located the Rescue Ship in a garage near the airport in the last week, remembers Perry fondly from her own childhood in West End. “He visited the elderly, the sick, and for Christmas, he was our Santa Claus, because he was a person who’d always give out a lot of toys. It was nothing for him to come out during the holidays. … He knew all the needy people, because he had access to the community. When we’d see him coming the week of Christmas, everyone knew exactly who he was and what he did, and we’d run and chase him and hang out outside the car, and he would honk his horn, and everybody would call at him, saying ‘Batman! Batman!’ Until he died, I didn’t know his name.”

According to Tyson, clear signs of progress are evident even at this preliminary stage. “We know where the car’s at. We’re trying to get it donated to a museum…and we’re trying to find someone who can actually finance it and fix it up for us. … We’re looking for a way to store it where it won’t cost the citizens or the city any money, and we’re looking for a means of having a fundraiser where we can actually get the car and fix it and put it somewhere where people can view it.” Tyson also noted that the city is trying to create a nonprofit for fundraising on repairs.

The most likely location for both the Rescue Ship’s maintenance and full-time residence is Old Car Heaven. “We are completely looking forward to getting it,” said Tamara Mahaffey, event coordinator at the car museum. “We’ve agreed to keep it, house it, to do what we can to assist in the repairs and even in the fundraising effort to make it back to what it used to be.

“We would like to house it permanently,” Mahaffey added, but noted that “that’s something that will be figured out once it’s repaired.”

In addition to raising funds to fix, maintain and house the Rescue Ship, Tyson also suggested the possibility of a scholarship fund centered in Marquetta Hill’s Willie Perry Foundation.

“My dad was a scientist, that’s what I consider him as,” Hill said. “He could take anything and build it and put it together and make it work functionally. … My goal is to go through schools and present a scholarship…to get kids back to doing those kinds of things, as well as to let them know about my father and about his legacy. He loved helping everybody.”

Beyond scholarships, Hill said, “We want to do other things – not just schools, but really targeting into the community to where we can help the elderly, we can help homeless women and men, just helping out in the community so that his legacy won’t go in vain.” In a true compliment to the equanimity of Perry’s work as Batman, there’s no shortage of groups for whom a dedicated Willie Perry scholarship would be appropriate.

Shook, who’s been trying to engineer a resolution like this since 2008, can see a bright future on the horizon. “We want to, by Aug. 3 of next year, have Willie Perry Day be a day of community service again. My pipe dream would be to have the car refurbished, we’d have the event somewhere downtown like Railroad Park, we’d have the car out there with the lights running and the record player going, and we’d be looking forward to releasing the film at Sidewalk and reminding people to make every day a Willie Perry Day.”

Photo courtesy of Marquetta Hill.

The White Knight returns

Throughout their interviews, each person quoted in this story returned again and again to the question of Perry’s legacy, which has long seemed in danger of languishing in obscurity like the Rescue Ship. In a town known as much for strife as for progress, they’ve found something pure and humane in the example set by Perry.

When asked to elaborate on what she thought her father’s most lasting legacy was, Hill responded, “Showing more love and caring for one another. … If you can help change a flat tire, why not? You’ve got so many single mothers around here, and you’ve got people who know they’re single mothers, and they won’t even take the trash out for them. The people in our neighborhood didn’t have to worry about anything, because when my dad walked outside and saw snow on the ground, he’d rake up other people’s snow, too, so that they could walk. … Just little things like that. That’s what started the process of him helping people. There was nothing too small that he wouldn’t do for people – his heart was just that big.”

“All eyes are looking at Birmingham right now, waiting to see what we’re going to do, especially with our history of racial strife and other negative things that people associate with Birmingham and all the things that are changing here,” Shook said. “Now is the time to tell this story. This is a guy, just after the era of the Civil Rights Movement, who went to every kind of neighborhood and community – black, white, rich, poor – and he saw no difference between them. I’m not trying to say he was a civil rights leader, but maybe in some ways he was; he proved that no matter your skin tone, no matter your religious beliefs, you could be a bridge between people.”

Birmingham can boast a few heroes, but Willie Perry’s singular legacy is one that lives on in an uncommon devotion to the common good. Whether it’s by donating your time to help out your community or by donating your money to a worthy nonprofit, the sense that anyone can be a Willie Perry has driven Shook to rescue the Rescue Ship.

“I think it’s an incredible story for Birmingham about the dedication of some of our citizens to put the well-being of others before themselves, in some ways, and hopefully inspire other people to take up Willie’s mantle on their own,” Shook said. “Everyone can be a superhero. You don’t need a cape, you don’t need a Batmobile. You can just be out in the community helping others, whether it’s your family, whether it’s your elderly neighbor, whether it’s cleaning up a park of trash – there’s all sorts of ways to be a hero to someone. And I’m trying to find a way to tell people that, look, everybody has this ability. Everyone can be a Willie Perry…if you just take the initiative.”

Art installation PUBLIC FORUM blurs the boundaries between art and democracy.

The police are here to protect us — true or false? Mass transit only helps poor people — true or false? Slavery is over — true or false? Jesus is more important than football — true or false?

These are just a few of the questions that form the centerpiece of a striking exhibition — part art installation, part game show, part town-hall meeting — that’s coming to downtown arts nonprofit Space One Eleven (SOE) for Artwalk weekend (Sept. 5-6). PUBLIC FORUM, the brainchild of conceptual artist Steve Lambert, blends the boundaries between art and democracy.

PUBLIC FORUM itself is a large sign with a snazzy midcentury flair whose central marquee contains an open-ended, provocative question — multiple questions will rotate throughout the weekend, including the ones seen above — with counters on either side tallying up the audience’s votes for true or false. Acting as a sort of game show host, Lambert queries voters on why they chose to vote a certain way, gently obliging them to defend their point of view or to consider the alternatives.

The genius of the exhibition, of course, is that few if any of the statements in question are as simple as a yes or a no answer. Without the possibility of a gray area, the audience has to consider the problems of absolutes.

“People don’t want to go to the extremes,” Lambert said. “They want there to be a middle button, like, ‘Sort Of.’ And the statements that I put up there are not easy to say yes or no to. … [One] statement was, ‘Alabama is the best that it could ever be.’ On the one hand, it’s hard not to be proud of where you’re from. But to say that it’s the best it could be and could never be better is also impossible. … People have to figure out what the question means for them, and then what their answer is, and they do that by talking it out. And that creates a public conversation.”

Public conversation is an important part of SOE’s mission, as the nonprofit serves not only as an art gallery, but also as an advocacy organization on behalf of the teaching and performance of art. In tandem with the Visual Artists Network — of which SOE is an inaugural member — the nonprofit is continuing its mission with PUBLIC FORUM to promote the relevance of art in the politics, culture and everyday life of the South.

That’s no small feat, especially since Lambert has already achieved a good deal of fame due to his ability to smuggle anti-consumerist messages into the glitz and glamour of attractive marquees, including a precursor to PUBLIC FORUM in which the statement was, “Capitalism works for me.” Despite the wry and subversive nature of his work, Lambert isn’t a firebrand, and he opts for the Socratic method of fostering critical dialogue instead of presuming to tell people how to think. According to the artist, that’s the key to the exhibition’s success.

A striking precursor to the PUBLIC FORUM show by Steve Lambert.

“The way that I do it, I’m not trying to confront anyone or call anyone out,” Lambert said. “I think it’s really important that people feel comfortable saying what they think. I’ve talked to so many people that it’s not important for me to win an argument. It’s much more important to connect with that person and have them kind of see that there’s more than one perspective.

“So I often will argue against my own beliefs; with the [“Capitalism works for me”] sign, sometimes I would argue for capitalism, just so this person who had these feelings against it had to really think through why, instead of me just being like, ‘Yeah, right on!’” Lambert recalled. “A lot of times people’s positions kind of soften when you’re not confronting them – I’ve kind of had a lot of success playing dumb, in a way. It’s nice coming to Birmingham, where to some extent I am real ignorant, where there’s a lot of things I don’t know about the history and what it’s like to live there now, just because I’ve never lived there. So I can ask really obvious questions because I’m an outsider. I can ask strange questions…make jokes, and leverage my ignorance to help draw people out.”

Drawing people out is easier said than done, especially in the South. According to Lambert, his Birmingham test audience was uniquely resistant to sharing private opinions. Getting around the dissembling diplomacy that’s such a key element of Southern politesse is just part of the fun, however.

“People felt sort of threatened by something that challenges an idea so fundamental in such a simple way,” Lambert said. “That’s the part that I love. It forces people to imagine – or just to realize that maybe they don’t know. … You’re standing on the edge, and the path ahead isn’t really clear. … We don’t really know the way forward to solve it, and there’s people that, when they’re standing in the path and looking at the unknown, it just drives them crazy. They want to turn away, and I hear that in the way they answer questions. They’re just trying to make it simpler or easier, because they don’t want to face the complexity.”

In addition to the value of just being congenial and empathetic, Lambert’s made his task of connecting with people considerably easier by creating such an eye-catching sign.

“I’ve developed my aesthetic over a long time, but it’s also strategic,” Lambert said. People like the words before they even know what the sign says. There’s a splash, and they like it; it’s comfortable, it’s familiar, it’s got these flashing lights, and then as people start to figure out what it means, I’ve already got them on my side a little bit. Then people start to come up with their own answers, and things become more complicated or more difficult. But if it looked as difficult as it actually was, people would run away.”

As fun as the forum can be, and as relaxed as its atmosphere is, Lambert’s still set up a challenge for himself trying to get at the heart of these questions in Birmingham. With that in mind, here’s another statement from PUBLIC FORUM for you to vote on: Politeness prevents us from having necessary conversations — true or false?

Steve Lambert and PUBLIC FORUM will be in residence at Space One Eleven on Friday, Sept. 5 from 5:30-8 p.m. and Saturday, Sept. 6 from 1-5 p.m. For more information, visit spaceoneeleven.org.

On Friday, Sept. 5, beta pictoris gallery will have an opening reception for Favorite Blues, an exhibition of the works on paper – along with four paintings – of the late abstract artist Eugene James Martin. The reception will take place from 6-8 p.m. at the downtown gallery.

Martin studied at the Corcoran in Washington, DC in the ‘60s, and while the experience gave him a thorough grounding in contemporary art, it definitely didn’t translate to immediate success. Until the ‘80s, when he finally settled in Lafayette, Louisiana, much of Martin’s work was composed in museums and public parks – he called benches his “offices” – and made with cheap pencils and inks on cheap (or found) paper.

Martin’s poverty during this time is reflected in the works in Favorite Blues, which covers 20 resilient years of the artist’s career from the mid-‘60s to the mid-‘80s. But far from detracting from the quality of the exhibition, the cheapness of Martin’s tools only emphasizes the wonderfully handmade nature of his work, which is utterly without pretense.

It’s a tired cliché to compare the works of a black artist to jazz, but for Martin – who actually gave being a jazz musician a shot before becoming a visual artist – it just feels right. His works on paper have a flowing, improvisational quality that’s immensely endearing, muted and accessible compared to the louder colors and patterns of his paintings. Even as Martin’s style evolves over the timeline of the exhibition, the musicality in his work – moving from minimalist riffs to swelling dynamics as the years progress – never recedes.

Image courtesy of beta pictoris gallery.

While Martin described some of his works as “satirical abstracts,” it’s hard to tell exactly what he’s satirizing, since the specificity that’s so key to satire is at odds with abstract art. The most obvious strand is a persistent racial commentary, perhaps poking fun at notions of minstrelsy and Pollyanna views of racial progress with black smiling figures. Even when the intentions are opaque, a strand of humor runs through most of the works on paper, a playfulness that makes Martin’s work welcoming in a way that abstract art rarely is.

Upon first walking into the gallery, it feels like a solitary, avuncular friend has left something behind for you specifically – simple gifts, made with humble tools – that grow rich with complex melodies once you take a closer look.

beta pictoris gallery is located at 2411 2nd Ave. N. For more information, call (205) 413-2999.

The massive fabric installations derive from fabric donated at spots around town and sewn together at community sewing days throughout the last few months, with Browder and the ladies of the Bib & Tucker Sew-Op from Woodlawn’s Desert Island Supply Co. taking on the lion’s share of the work. The fruits of the labor will be Magic Chromacity, two huge quilts that bring art out of a separate gallery space and into the real world.

It’s an ambitious project that borders on the masochistic, but Browder has drawn on a seemingly limitless well of energy – and a great deal of community support – to make it happen. Browder exudes a sense of leadership and easy charisma that makes it easy to see why people are drawn to assist in bringing her grand visions to life.

When asked about the massive scale of the project, Browder laughed and replied, “That’s the reason you become an artist; you don’t do stuff to be safe and comfortable and hope it works. You go for broke.”

Magic Chromacity is interesting for a number of reasons, but scale is just one of them. In addition to the ambition of the exhibition, the quilts also bring art into mundane, everyday life, as well as reflecting the unique character of Birmingham.

Photo by David Garrett.

“One reason I do these outdoor pieces is that I’ve always had a beef with painters who are stuck within this white-wall community, and they don’t really want to break out of it, and it drives me bananas,” Browder said. “I feel like a lot of my work is all about opening up the space up and making the indoor and the outdoor seem less like they have a boundary around them. … People who are nervous to go into the museum, this may bring them in a little bit more and feel like it’s an active space, and not something where they’ll have to knock on the door and ask permission to come inside.

“The public and private conversation…about the fabric traditionally being a private item and putting it in a public sphere, I feel like it kind of helps the community get why contemporary art is something that’s accessible and not something to be shunned, or be nervous about,” Browder added.

On that note, Magic Chromacity provides a colorful exclamation point to UAB’s desire for Alys Stephens and AEIVA to constitute a cultural corridor on the Southside. “I think that in a lot of ways it is a sort of welcome mat,” said Jared Ragland, visual media and outreach coordinator at the UAB Department of Art and Art History, which is coordinating the exhibition. “We’re here and this is the kind of work we’re doing: progressive, contemporary, interdisciplinary and fun. And it has a community element to it.

“The great thing about the project is that if you’re the person that brought that piece of star fabric, you’re going to be able to see it on the side of the building once it goes up,” Ragland added. “It reinforces that community aspect – it’s not like once the installation is pinned or sewn together, it becomes this uniform thing. It retains the personality of the people who have contributed and sewn it together. … It’s about everybody that’s worked on the project together.”

Browder wholeheartedly agreed. “This project, Magic Chromacity, is now Birmingham’s in general,” the artist said. “If I were to show this again…it would always refer back to Birmingham as its place of origin. … Everybody who’s there, who makes it, is the piece.”

Amanda Browder will give a free lecture at AEIVA on Thursday, Aug. 28 at 6 p.m. The opening reception will be 5-7:30 p.m. the following day. For more information, call (205) 975-2787.

]]>https://weldbham.com/blog/2014/08/26/a-city-in-stitches-birmingham/feed/0The areas of his expertisehttps://weldbham.com/blog/2014/08/18/the-areas-of-his-expertise/
https://weldbham.com/blog/2014/08/18/the-areas-of-his-expertise/#respondTue, 19 Aug 2014 05:21:57 +0000http://weldbham.com/?p=17808John Hodgman to perform at Bottletree, serve as homing beacon to nerds across the Southeast.

Birmingham nerds everywhere rejoiced when the news came down that humorist, resident expert on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and former professional literary agent John Hodgman would be bringing his singular brand of comedy to the Bottletree Café on the evening of Sept. 7. After starring as the PC in Apple’s series of Mac vs. PC ads, Hodgman has become one of the most beloved figures in American nerd culture, as well as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand character actors for portraying tweedy weirdoes.

Beyond his career in television and film, Hodgman’s greatest achievement may well be his engrossing, hilarious almanacs of fake trivia, which listed the nine presidents who had hooks for hands and the arcane secrets of Yale (an accredited four-year university in New Haven, Connecticut), among other facets of complete world knowledge. The series culminated in 2012 with That is All, which detailed the prophesied end of the world – Ragnarok – as Hodgman assumed the persona of a deranged millionaire.

Since the world has inexplicably continued turning, Hodgman’s post-Ragnarok act is veering in a more personal direction that reflects the witty, trenchant personality he brings to his long-running podcast, Judge John Hodgman. In point of fact, the Bottletree show will see the involvement of one of the most memorable guests on Judge John Hodgman, Huntsville resident and sadness tree gardenerJason Sims.

Hodgman spoke to Weld in advance of his Birmingham performance, discussing the changes in his act since 2012, Jason Sims’ role in the show and the special appeal of Birmingham and the Bottletree.

Weld: Do you recall your performance with The Daily Show tour at Alys Stephens in 2012?

John Hodgman: You must be talking about when I and Adam Lowitt and Al Madrigal came and performed in Birmingham. Now, that was an important night in my life, because I had never spent time in Birmingham, and the audience in Birmingham was unbelievably wonderful and gracious.

It was the first night that I had performed with Al Madrigal, and I was incredibly intimidated by it, because Al is a true, classic standup comedian who’s never wanted to do anything else in his life. And I, as you know, am a dilettante; I’m an author, I’m a former professional literary agent, I’m an imitation actor, a public radio personality, a talker onstage and off, but in a specifically standup comedy environment, not knowing what the audience would expect from me…I found a true excitement that made me want to do more unscripted or semi-scripted speaking in front of audiences. The Birmingham audience was so great and gracious and fun to play with. … I’m grateful to Birmingham for that, and as you know, we went to the Bottletree afterward to hang out, and I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get down there ever since.

JH: But let’s be clear: we mean a lot to each other. It means a lot to me! We’re gonna go places, Birmingham! This is a great new friendship that we’ve got.

Weld: I also think it’s entirely appropriate that you’re performing at the Bottletree, since it’s the sort of place you might go to in order to see a show themed around Ragnarok, for instance.

JH: Now, this isn’t a show themed around Ragnarok, I’m going to tell you that right now. This is a show themed around what happens when Ragnarok doesn’t happen, when the apocalypse that you predicted in your bestselling series of fake histories of an invented world and then that you predicted in your critically acclaimed Netflix special called Ragnarok does not save you from the middle age that terrifies you. The universe did not do to me and to all of you the favor of ending when I turned 41, and consequently, we all need to figure out what to do next.

This show really emerges very specifically from that question, and for me, what to do next was to start creating material, to start writing for the stage instead of writing another book, so that I could go out there and get that good Birmingham feeling again. Consequently, this show is a lot more straightforward comedy. … It begins with me taking off a lot of disguises that I’ve used in my creative career: as the resident expert, as the Deranged Millionaire – I don’t go totally nude. But I just try to get to the basic core of John Hodgman, human being on Earth, just like you and me, but with better facial hair. I’m telling a lot of stories that just emerge from my regular life, as opposed to the invented ones that I’ve created for myself in the past.

Now, this isn’t to say that I’m not going to dress up as Ayn Rand from 1980 and sing a song in her voice while playing the ukulele. Of course that’s going to happen. I’m John Hodgman. But it is profoundly different from what people saw back [in 2012]…this is not necessarily going to be a lot of current events, political material.

Weld: Will you still be throwing socks?

JH: I will not throw socks, I don’t think. That was an interesting experiment – I used to take off my shoes and perform barefoot and throw my socks into the audience as a gift to them. And it was interesting to see in which venues and in which cities where the socks were not appreciated and rejected. Birmingham was a sock-keeping town; if I remember correctly, Flagstaff was a sock-throwing-back town. … A lot of people didn’t take it as a kind offer; some people just took it as, A guy just threw his socks at me.You find your people in this world, do you know what I mean? You find your people.

Weld: What is Jason Sims’ involvement in this performance?

JH: The truth is, you do find your people. Part of my mission with the Judge John Hodgman podcast was to be able to just be myself. … I wanted to be myself in all of my thorny prickliness, and also to interact with regular humans out there in the world, since I enjoy it so much.

One of the people I met via the podcast was Jason Sims of Huntsville, Alabama, and I came to know him better over the past couple of years since he was also a regular caller to The Best Show on WFMU with Tom Scharpling – which shall return – and there, and on my podcast, and on his Twitter feed and everything else he reveals himself to be this great, wonderful, wise and witty dude. I’m so grateful to the Internet for allowing me to find my people in the world, like Jason, and for everyone to find their own people in the world. If it weren’t for this incredible, interactive web that connects us, how many of us would be out there alone in the world, in our own personal Huntsville, Alabamas, feeling like, I’m crazy because I think differently than everyone here, and who else is out there for me?

So when I set up the Bottletree [show], I knew that I wanted Jason to come and do something with me. I know that he’s been doing some standup, so I hope that he will do some, but beyond that I’m not entirely sure what – I have the feeling that Jason and I could fill up the entire hour just talking to each other. And I think the reality is that Bottletree is going to see the emergence of an incredible new star in the person of Jason Sims from Huntsville, Alabama.

Weld: That idea of finding your people really does strike me as the story for a lot of folks in Birmingham, who maybe don’t find themselves fitting in with the rest of the state.

JH: The Bottletree really struck me as a place where people find each other, and that is very much what all writing and performing is all about: it’s reminding people that they’re not alone. And that’s why I wanted to come.

John Hodgman will perform at Bottletree Cafe at 9 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 7. Tickets are $18 and may be purchased at thebottletree.com.

In two years both writing about music and working on calendars in this publication, it’s rare to find an event that has the perfect timing, or the stellar lineup, or the ideal array of attractions that would allow it to sell itself. The third annual High Five Fest, coming to Bottletree Café on Saturday, Aug. 9, is one of those events.

In a nutshell: an all-day music festival featuring some of the best acts in the state, tasty food from the Barbecutioners, beer from Good People and its own super hero, High Five Man. The lineup includes acts from a wide variety of genres, two of which – Plate Six and Arclight – are reuniting specifically for the festival.

The headliner is Man or Astro-Man?, who are almost certainly one of the top five science fiction-infused surf rock bands ever to come out of Auburn, Alabama. If you distilled the gleefully nerdy id of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and sprinkled it to taste over the frenetic guitar heroics of Dick Dale, you might approximate their live show. That’s the thing though; with their combination of live-wire energy, chops for days and an endlessly kitschy sense of humor, Man or Astro-Man? are the genuine, irreducible article.

On what’s more or less the complete opposite side of the aesthetic spectrum, you’ve got Beitthemeans, who have been making Southern rock that hasn’t occupied the same ZIP code as frills for more than a decade. Both Beitthemeans and Man or Astro-Man’s songs are rooted in the past, but where Man or Astro-Man? repurpose old dreams of the future, Beitthemeans delve into the tangled, tragic, dirty roots of the South with their storytelling. That probably sounds brainier than it ought to; there’s no Alabama band that’s harder to describe without using the words “badass”, “kickass” or “hardass” than Beitthemeans.

Joining the long runners are two fixtures of Birmingham’s music scene from the last decade, Plate Six and Arclight. Here’s where I admit that I was either too young or too uncool to see Plate Six in their Cave9 heyday, but their recorded output has held up remarkably well as a part of Birmingham’s hardcore history. Brad Reed, the festival organizer, puts it more passionately (and bluntly): “the greatest B’ham band of all time.”

The newer acts on the bill don’t have much left to prove. Banditos are a unique fusion of classic soul, Southern rock and old-time music – think more Stephen Foster than Woody Guthrie – that are never less than engaging. In Snow are a post-rock band who are still able to rock pretty hard, with guitar-driven instrumentals that are long on passion and blessedly short on math. Shaheed and DJ Supreme are competing with K.L.U.B. Monsta and the Green Seed for the title of Birmingham’s best hip-hop act, and when the horns kick in on Supreme’s samples, you can definitely believe it.

The local act I’m most excited about, though, is Wray, who have made the leap from reliable, plucky opener to one of Birmingham’s very best bands in seemingly no time at all. Among the many ambitious, excellent acts on Communicating Vessels’ roster of bands right now, Wray may well have the most staying power when it comes to national appeal. Their hypnotic, reverb-friendly approach to indie rock has earned praise from The New York Times, and there’s something about diving into the band’s ocean of sound in a live show that feels particularly epic. Lots of bands have fun or engrossing concerts, but Wray’s feel like an experience, and that’s why they may well steal the show at High Five Fest.

A quick note about the Barbecutioners, the group of like-minded barbecue aficionados who will be providing smoked chicken, pork and tofu at High Five Fest: it’s the best barbecue I’ve ever had. That may not mean much coming from an apostate who’s just mild on the subject of BBQ in general, but trust me, the food is absolutely something to look forward to. Having Good People take over the taps for the occasion just sweetens the deal.

Summer lends itself to nostalgia more than any other season, and in a time of triple-digit temperatures and wasps, it’s not hard to see those illusions for what they really are. But there’s a special sweetness to summer in Birmingham, a sense of fellowship and fun and youthfulness, and High Five Fest is shaping up to be a truly worthy sendoff.

High Five Fest will take place at Bottletree Café on Saturday, Aug. 9. Doors and food at 2 p.m., music at 3 p.m. Tickets are $15.

“Drapetomania” was a term coined in 1851 by physician Samuel Cartwright to explain the pathology, in his mind, of Southern slaves who wanted to be free men and women. The pseudoscience was disdained even in its own time, but the toxic notion of explaining away someone else’s free will lives on in modern society.

For local hip-hop quartet the Green Seed – who titled their new LP Drapetomania at the suggestion of EHQuestionmark, the cagey design collective responsible for the album’s phenomenal cover art – it’s a rallying cry for people to rebel against empty materialism, wack gimmicks and bad relationships, all wrapped up in a musical package that would feel right at home alongside the Native Tongues crews of the early ‘90s.

If that all sounds deadly serious, then you’re only getting part of the story with the Green Seed. Because while the act is resolutely professional when it comes to their craft, they’re also hilarious, steeped in layers of pop culture that leaven the album’s heavier moments. MCs R-Tist and C.O.M.P.L.E.T. allude heavily to A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, and they haven’t forgotten the crucial element of humor that grounded the introspective work of those forebears.

R-Tist and C.O.M.P.L.E.T. make for an unbelievably cohesive lyrical unit, couching thoughtful sentiments in witty one-liners and sharing the wealth on elaborate verses. While not as distinctive a pair as, say, Phife Dawg and Q-Tip, on narrative songs like “Is Where the Heart Is,” the duo prove adept at portraying thematic counterparts, playing up the worldliness of R-Tist against the spirituality of C.O.M.P.L.E.T.

The lyricism is so dense and so rife with references to unpack that it’s hard to do it all justice in a single music feature. In a sense, it’s rap for liberal arts majors. (That’s a compliment, for the record.) Here’s just one jaw-dropping example from C.O.M.P.L.E.T. on “Amigos”: “Most of my real amigos are simplistic people who shop at TJ Maxx and Ross instead of Spiegel / We tight like the Ring and Smeagol / A band of brothers who go to war together / And weather the winter cold in the woods of Bastogne.”

Just a few songs later, the MCs give a well-deserved shoutout to their DJs amid an extended riff on The Wire, rapping, “Jeff C. and FX on the turntables, y’all / They be killing it like Wee-Bey / Wired up / Moving product like Barksdale.” And indeed, Jeff C. and FX are completely up to the task of matching the wordplay of their frontmen, bringing an aggressive production style to bear – in tandem with R-Tist, who also holds down production duties – that’s absolutely simpatico with the lyrics.

The production can have a maximalist, cinematic style akin to the brassy sound of label-mates Shaheed and DJ Supreme, but it’s also capable of downshifting into darker sonic terrain when the subject matter requires the DJs to hold back a bit. There’s plenty of old-school record scratching to be had, but the middle of Drapetomania really clicks when it captures a similar atmosphere — understated yet expressive — that Jay-Z did his best work rapping over on Reasonable Doubt. And then there are moments like “Road Trip,” veiled in a rejuvenating organ tone, which are just sublime.

R-Tist and C.O.M.P.L.E.T. have a list of grievances a mile wide on Drapetomania, but the targets who bear the brunt of the assault are the sellout sucker MCs who are as prevalent in the rap game today as they ever were. “I won’t conform to the same uniform that’s worn by the new minstrels,” C.O.M.P.L.E.T. says, while both MCs urge listeners to “never give into the bidding of the puppeteer.”

Things get even more deliciously caustic when they level their aim at the poisonous influence of money on the industry, particularly on the philippic “Gimmicks”. “My ability to use any gimmick is limitless / As long as I get some press,” C.O.M.P.L.E.T. raps in the persona of a sellout, adding, “I’m hip with skinny jeans and I’ll hop just like a rabbit / I’ll rap with Mini-Me as long as I get the cabbage. … And if anyone is wondering who I be / I’m this year’s pathetic, wannabe MC.”

On “All the Same” – another attack on the state of the industry – R-Tist raps, “If you’re looking for kismet, well, listen to this sh*t.” It’s a clever line, but it’s also critical to understanding what makes Drapetomania work: there’s always a sense that the quartet is completely confident that they’re doing what they were destined for. Unlike so many others out there in the game trying to reach someone else’s benchmark of success, the Green Seed set their own artistic standards.

Ultimately, that message is central to album closer “Town of Steal,” an ode to the Magic City that’s going to slay audiences every time it plays in Birmingham. “The bondage and strife of the past threaten lives of the masses, but it’s hard to burn steel down to ashes,” the song goes. “When it takes a beating, you just heat it up and recast / Mold it in a new shape, give it a new face / Not a face of death, but a face of life. … We’re ready to expand / Cultivate Birmingham into a musical promised land.”

It’s a hopeful message, but when it comes down to it, Drapetomania’s not about hope, or about spirituality, or about striving, even though those themes all feature prominently on the record. It’s about victory.

The Green Seed will play their final Birmingham show of the year on Friday, Aug. 1 at 9:30 p.m. on the Miller Light Stage at Secret Stages. To buy Drapetomania, visit communicatingvessels.net.

]]>For better or worse, the average American’s first thoughts of Birmingham focus on the darkest elements of its history: fire hoses, segregation, Bull Connor and more. But like any city, there’s more to Birmingham than that, and a Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!–style game show is looking to prove it.

“We’re not going to tell the whole story of Birmingham in two hours. It’s not a purely educational lecture,” said Rykov, who has hosted a number of fundraisers that blend humor and education. “It’s not just 1963; there’s so much more to Birmingham than that.”

The 12-person panel will include Mayor Richard Arrington Jr., Frank Stitt and James Spann — arguably the most important men in Birmingham’s political, culinary and meteorological histories, respectively — as well as witty Weld columnist Courtney Haden, No More Bull! series contributor and UAB history professor Pamela Sterne King, Lyric Theatre advocate Glenny Brock and magisterial BSC history professor Randy Law. Comedian Christopher Davis, Laura Kate Whitney of REV Birmingham’s REVIVE project, City Councilman Jay Roberson and AL.com’s Kyle Whitmire and John Archibald round out the list.

The panelists will be asked questions about the various legends and curiosities of Birmingham’s civic mythology, including a bluffing round featuring the participation of Mayor William Bell and Oak Hill Cemetery’s historical reenactors. Without giving away too many details, Rykov mentioned stories about Birmingham’s alleged ghost infestation; the public health career of Louise “Lou” Wooster, the madam who tended to the sick and dying during the city’s cholera epidemic of 1873; and everyone’s favorite alcoholic elephant, Miss Fancy.

“It’s a city with many stories,” Rykov said. “Some of them are tragic, some of them are hilarious, some of them are confusing and quirky, and we’re presenting them all in a lighthearted but educational way.”

Can You Repeat That? will take place at 7:30 p.m. at Virginia Samford Theatre on Aug. 7. Tickets are $25 and will raise money for the Birmingham History Center to find a new permanent residence. For more information, check out the event’s Facebook page or call (205) 202-4146.

The literary critic Harold Bloom famously wrote about the anxiety of influence, the struggle of poets to reconcile the impact of their predecessors with their own sense of originality. On his new LP I Won’t Answer, released on sister labels PIPEANDGUN and Communicating Vessels on July 22, local singer-songwriter Noel wrestles with his Southern Baptist upbringing and the task of updating traditional gospel blues to modern standards – and he succeeds at every turn.

“I needed to sort of excavate my past, having been raised Southern Baptist,” Noel – full name Noel Johnson, formerly a member of the White Oaks and the Great Book of John – said in an interview. “So I started thinking about the very best elements of the music that I’d been exposed to as a result of that, and lyrically, I wanted to be able to sort of look at the relationship of an individual to God as its own subject matter, as opposed to being ‘Christian music.’”

That Southern Baptist perspective is filtered through the tales of characters caught in moments of terror, reckoning and resolve. The sum total presents I Won’t Answer as a worthy successor to the works of the Louvin Brothers, Alabama songwriters who contrasted the white-hot righteousness of divinity with the absolute corruption of the material world.

According to Johnson, the genesis of the album’s sound came from exploring the question, “What would it sound like if Beck recorded an old Woody Guthrie song that captured the view of fire and brimstone religion?” Working from some demos, Johnson and producer Armand Margjeka molded the largely unformed songs into chiaroscuro soundscapes that combine a modern, genre-busting sensibility with the folk influences of populist music and spirituals.

That aesthetic feels most immediate on the album’s standout title track, an undulating, relentlessly catchy declaration of faith. “The Lord came to me in blindness and appeared to me in flames,” the narrator sings, and now it’s time to “Say I’m sorry to my parents, say I’m sorry to the board; I’m sorry, John D. Rockefeller, Mr. Henry Ford.” The outside world may not understand the narrator’s newfound sense of purpose, but then again, he doesn’t really care to understand the outside world, either.

There’s plenty of satirical humor woven throughout I Won’t Answer, but the world the album inhabits is intense enough to evoke the bleak wastes of Cormac McCarthy. The production style – made even more effective by the involvement of engineer Darrell Thorp, a three-time Grammy winner who’s worked with Radiohead, Beck and OutKast – is full of strings, horns and foreboding synths, creating a sonic enormity that hints at empty space more than lushness, and which makes the most of Johnson’s deep, haunting voice.

Even if the album’s message is ultimately uplifting, its tone draws directly from an Old Testament world of fire and blood, “the perfect world of crime and suffering.” Take this litany from “Black Oil White Bread,” for instance, a screed against the short-sighted greed of the powerful: “Well Jesus said…kill your greed, pluck out the eye, cut off the hand, eye of the needle, woe to rich man.” The true ideology of those who ignore those strictures, he sings in another song, is to “Burn the new world and curse the old.”

Organized religion, as Johnson found in his own upbringing, can present more of a hindrance than a help. “We envy the sacred and emulate the profane,” he sings on “Crime and Religion,” noting that both of the titular industries pay.

“Once you have your connection with God – whatever that may be, and whatever words you use, if you use words at all – nobody can tell you what that is,” Johnson said. “No matter how much you’re struggling with yourself, you’re never really lost. And maybe being raised in a really religious way convinced you you were more lost than you really were.”

That idea underscores the fact that amid the stories of depravity, selfishness and illusion, there’s still a great deal of hope in I Won’t Answer. “I feel about as low as any soul can go and still be saved,” Johnson sings on “Lost in Love” — the melancholy opening track of the album, which premiered on The Huffington Post — encapsulating the album’s juxtaposition of sadness and optimism in a nutshell.

The gorgeous “Lord Look After Me,” one of the last songs written for the record, expresses that duality with cathartic sincerity. Representing the album’s dynamics in microcosm, the song begins in desperation and dissonance. “I am wild and my heart can’t be trusted – my radiator’s busted, Lord, look after me,” Johnson sings. As additional voices sweeten and stabilize the song, he continues, “I am fire spreading by the wind, the fields are all in cinders, Lord. … Lord, come down again; I am dyin’ to make you my friend, but death is not the end, Lord.”

Johnson rightly takes umbrage at being labeled a Christian musician, since his music is more concerned with giving a voice to lost sheep everywhere, no matter how dire their circumstances may seem, than it is with his personal affirmation. Years of searching brought Johnson to his truth, and he clearly takes intense solace in it, even in the face of the deluge.

“What are you worried for?” the final words of the record ask. “It’s just the end of days.”

On the weekend of Oct. 24-27, the Dalai Lama will visit Birmingham to explore the Magic City’s relationship with the broader struggle for human rights – its role, to borrow Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous phrase, in humanity’s “single garment of destiny.” The exiled Tibetan leader’s visit will culminate with a public appearance at Regions Field on Oct. 26, and if a local organizer has his way, an awe-inspiring art installation will be in residence across the street at the west green of Railroad Park.

Marcus Turner is the man trying to bring the Inner Light Festival to Birmingham, which is planned to take place from Oct. 24-27. If Turner can secure funding from both individual and corporate donors in time, the arts festival will be centered around the massive inflatable sculptures of an English artists’ collective called the Architects of Air, who have displayed their colorful works in 40 countries and on five continents.

Founded in the mid-‘80s by artist Alan Parkinson, the Architects of Air began during Parkinson’s work with children, and the finished product that travels today invokes a similar sense of wonder. Working from fundamental bases of light, color and design, the Architects of Air structures – which they call luminaria, due to the impact natural light has on the plastic installations – are psychedelic worlds of color that attendees can travel inside of.

Turner initially tried to raise the funds to bring the Architects of Air to Railroad Park in time for the Barons’ opening home stand against the Chicago White Sox, but ran out of time. Undeterred, Turner booked Railroad Park for Oct. 24-27, only to find out later that through a serendipitous accident of scheduling, he’d positioned Birmingham for a potentially historic photo opportunity.

While it’s far from certain that the Dalai Lama would choose to walk into the Inner Light Festival’s kaleidoscopic archipelago of installations – security concerns, for one, are not insignificant – Turner believes that the narrative potential of having such a force for peace and harmony identified with Birmingham is too great to dismiss out of hand. Many of His Holiness’ photos are taken in nondescript temples and mountaintops, Turner says. This would be an opportunity to localize a once-in-a-lifetime appearance from a world leader in an apparently unlikely place: Birmingham, Alabama.

“If you go to other countries and you ask people their thoughts on Birmingham and Alabama, the first things that pop into their heads are dogs and fire hoses and hatred,” Turner said. “And those things were a major part of our history, but it’s time for another story. … [The Dalai Lama’s presence at the Inner Light Festival] would give us an opportunity as a city to craft a story about where we’re at now, where we’re going: the religious tolerance, the human values, stepping into the light of the future, approaching this new age we’re going into as a city.

“This could be an instant change of perception,” Turner concluded.

Photo courtesy of Marcus Turner.

The Inner Light Festival would be more than an elaborate photo opportunity, of course. The luminaria remove art from the staid context of a museum, bringing marvels of architectural design and color theory into the out-of-doors. As Turner put it, “Art’s not meant to be put in boxes.” The greatest appeal of the installations from the Architects of Air, however, is the democracy of wonder; anyone, whether an art history professor or a toddler, can appreciate the vibrant atmosphere of the installations. Indeed, the origin of the luminaria lays with Architects of Air founder Alan Parkinson’s work with disabled children.

“He first came up with this when he was doing an after-school program for disabled children,” Turner explained. “Someone brought out an inflatable mattress for the kids, and he saw how much fun they had with it. It was such an obsession for him to make this happen – he spent seven years of life trying to come up with the idea for it. … There’s a lot of vision, persistence and creativity that goes into something of that scale. Kids could see that and think, ‘You know, anything’s possible.’”

Photo courtesy of Marcus Turner.

Parkinson’s love of children is shared by the Dalai Lama, who has expressed interest in visiting with local kids during his visit. Turner also believes that the Dalai Lama’s participation in an Amnesty International campaign against the use of torture – which featured the holy man made up to appear that he’d been beaten black and blue – might indicate his willingness to participate in rehabilitating the Birmingham narrative.

When asked if he had any personal religious admiration for the Dalai Lama, Turner replied, “I believe in love, compassion and kindness. … And I think that’s what the Dalai Lama stands for. It’s not religious at all; it’s just a way of making the world a better place through a simple philosophy.” The Dalai Lama, after all, is one of the world’s most famous voices advocating on behalf of the environment, pacifism, women’s rights and many more causes.

There’s quite a lot of hope at play with the Inner Light Festival – first, that the project will be funded at all, and second, that the Dalai Lama will be curious enough to tour the installation and be photographed in the process. But as critical as logistical and fundraising concerns are to their success, projects like the Inner Light Festival articulate themselves most essentially in the language of dreams: in the dream of childlike wonder, in the dream of a landmark photograph, in the dream of a new and better Birmingham.

For more information on the Inner Light Festival, check out its Facebook page. To donate to the project, click here.

“To have the arts of peace, but not the arts of war, is to lack courage. To have the arts of war, but not the arts of peace, is to lack wisdom.” – Hayashi Razan

Starting Saturday, June 28, the Birmingham Museum of Art will present a rare ticketed exhibition, following up the splendid Delacroix exhibition shown in the spring. Rarer still for the staid reputation of an art museum, the exhibition — entitled Lethal Beauty, a collection of samurai arms and armor traveling to Birmingham from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts — is fun, a perfect show for the summer.

Lethal Beauty is a collection of five full suits of samurai armor, along with about a dozen blades, muskets introduced to Japan by the Portuguese and naginatas wielded by the onna-bugeisha, the warrior women of Japan. Dozens of prints depicting famous scenes from Japanese military history, including the Tale of the 47 Ronin, round out Lethal Beauty. The exhibition will be accompanied by two sets of contemporary children’s armor for kids to try on, a Japanese film festival, Japanese-themed Art on the Rocks parties each month and other fun activities.

The arms and armor in the exhibition represent some of the finest martial craftsmanship in the history of the world, but they’re also relics of a highly stratified Japanese social structure, expressions of the religious customs of a society and artifacts detailing the history and values of a culture that is still very much a part of modern Japan.

The rise and decline of the samurai

Dating all the way back to the 10th century, the samurai were the Japanese warrior class until their self-imposed abolition in the middle of the 19th century. According to our popular conception of the samurai, they were a fearless caste of warriors with white-knuckle devotion to the lords they served, prizing honor above all other virtues. The way of the warrior, bushido, was a stoic acceptance of death and duty that was as critical to that class as the chivalric code was to European knights.

That last bit actually gets at the heart of the matter, because there’s not a lot of evidence that the chivalric code was terribly important to most European knights, who were motivated by very relevant goals of greed, conquest and glory. The samurai of the Sengoku period — the Warring States period, a nearly unbroken string of civil wars from about 1467 to 1573 that kept samurai warriors in high demand — had a bit more in common with ruthless, Machiavellian schemers like Richard III than crusaders like Richard the Lionheart.

The Sengoku period came to an end with the triumph of the last of the so-called Three Unifiers of Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu, a powerful warlord who ushered in more than 250 years of peace under his shogunate. During this time, the feudal warlords of Japan — the daimyo — were forced to maintain residences in the city of Edo, now modern-day Tokyo, where their families would be held as glorified hostages. With peace having broken out, and an increasingly centralized government solidifying under Tokugawa’s rule, the samurai began to lose their purpose in Japanese society, and thus had to begin explicitly justifying themselves. What role does a warrior have in a peaceful society?

Image courtesy of the BMA.

The armor of Lethal Beauty dates to this Edo period, when the lavish, ornate suits served a ceremonial, rather than martial, role. It was during this time, according to BMA Curator of Asian Art Dr. Donald Wood, that the daimyo began what amounted to a vast public relations campaign.

“They had to make pilgrimages twice a year,” Wood said. “The daimyo were not allowed to live in Edo permanently; they had to go back and manage their estates while their wives and children were basically held hostage. That could be very expensive, managing a lavish lifestyle in Edo, maintaining your castle and maintaining all of your samurai. There were many samurai who were dirt poor.

“They were expected to be in full armor for different ceremonies and for different processions they had to make up and down the country twice a year. It got to be very expensive, but the artisans who crafted these pieces were superb, so the lords who commissioned these pieces just lavished attention on their arms and armor. You’ll see in the exhibition that the detail is just amazing.”

Though these grand processions provided a Japanese equivalent to the Roman notion of bread and circuses, the fact was that more samurai were serving as administrators and bureaucrats than as warriors. Others might become fencing instructors or brigands, but peacetime undermined the entire notion of a warrior class.

In the midst of this existential crisis, the arts became a key aspect of samurai culture, with even the lowliest — as admonished by scholars like the Neo-Confucianist Hayashi Razan, quoted above — learning to master both sword and paintbrush.

“The concentration and the effort that was required to master the Japanese sword, or to become a really good calligrapher, were thought to be one and the same,” Wood said. “There’s a tale of one calligrapher in Japan wanting to give a friend of his a present — his friend had given him this gorgeous rock for his garden, took a hundred men to bring it over and so on — and so this calligrapher sent over, a month or two later, a piece of calligraphy. And the guy who sent over the rock was a little upset. So he went over to the calligrapher’s studio and there were hundreds of samples of this same calligraphy that he’d done, practicing and practicing until he got it perfect. The two go together very much in Japanese thought.”

Wealthier samurai became patrons of the arts, lavishing money not only on their own arms and armor, but also on the ritualized tea ceremony, the flower arrangement of ikebana, calligraphy, painting, ceramics and Noh drama. Just as critically, it was during this period that our somewhat naïve understanding of the samurai as the purely honorable warrior emerged, also in part to solidify the caste’s importance in a peaceful society.

The legitimacy and necessity of the samurai was conveyed through the shock and awe of grand processions and elaborate armor, but it was also conveyed through peerless craftsmanship. No matter how impoverished or irrelevant the samurai might seem during this period — only about a quarter of the caste was ever employed by the shogunate at a given time, with others living on a rice dole — there’s no questioning the quality of their tools.

The fine art of murder

In the early days of the samurai, warriors would shout out their long family lineages before engaging in battle, hoping to avoid the unthinkable shame of being killed by someone of lower rank than oneself. That rigid emphasis on class comes through implicitly in the incredibly ornate armor and weaponry of Lethal Beauty, which combines the brutality of medieval warfare with a refined elegance and attention to detail that seems almost oxymoronic to contemporary sensibilities.

The armor in the exhibition, arranged on traditional tatami mats, differs from the armor worn by Western knights. Made of connecting pieces of plate, lacquer, wood and even papier-mâché, the armor is quite a bit lighter and more versatile than its European counterparts. Reflecting both the religious and the practical aspects of the samurai, many samurai helmets had a hole at the top from which the soul was said to escape, as well as a tube at the chin to release sweat.

When asked if any particular weapon or suit of armor displayed a special sense of the grandeur of the samurai, Wood immediately responded, “Oh, they all do. There’s one when you first get in the show…where the metalwork has been made to look like the color of flesh. That’s pretty impressive, but the one set next to it has these huge gilded blades set into that are two, two-and-a-half feet tall.”

Image courtesy of the BMA.

The most impressive craftsmanship, however, comes from the iconic Japanese katana, a weapon that was a personal artistic statement, a symbol of honor and a religious expression all in one. “The Japanese sword can be up to 50 or 60,000 layers of steel,” Wood said. “They would fold it, and every time you folded it, you would have to dip it in ice water to temper it. … It’s a complex process; a good sword would take months to complete. And a sword smith is a Shinto priest, so it’s a very religious activity, making a sword. Each sword is thought to have its own soul, its own spirit, and so each samurai had a name for his sword.”

The dozen or so swords in Lethal Beauty are still razor-sharp, according to Wood.

A national mythology

The terrible majesty of the samurai, combined with their direct patronage of the arts, resulted in samurai becoming the primary subject of Japanese artistic expression, from bunraku puppet drama to epic woodblock prints. The latter constitute the remainder of Lethal Beauty, depicting both famous historical figures of Japan and its most beloved folk stories.

The woodblock printing industry underwent a sort of golden age in the mid-1800s, according to Wood, near the official abolition of the samurai. “In the 19th century, Japan was an incredibly literate population, where most people could read and write in the big cities,” Wood said. “And so all these popular novels needed illustrations, which was a big boon for the woodblock industry. The kabuki theaters needed advertisements, and during the latter part of the 19th century, the Meiji period, historical dramas took place in a very militaristic atmosphere, so you get a lot of samurai depictions from that time. … It was a huge industry, and millions of prints were made. I’ve been here 27 years now, and we now have over 1,000 Japanese prints in our collection, and we’ve never been offered the same print twice.”

Image courtesy of the BMA.

The subject matter of the prints in Lethal Beauty is, of course, the samurai, featuring the legendary tales of such warriors as the 47 Ronin. “The Tale of the 47 Ronin is a true story from the early 18th century, in which a lord, or daimyo, was shamed, and forced to commit suicide, and his retainers then became masterless samurai, or ronin,” Wood explained. “They waited and plotted for two years to take their revenge, and then one night they broke into the mansion of the lord who had forced their lord to commit suicide, and they killed him and a number of his retainers. They took the severed head of the enemy to the grave of their lord and presented it. They knew they’d committed a crime, so they immediately turned themselves in to the shogun, who was so impressed by their sense of loyalty and determination to the samurai code that he allowed them the privilege of committing ritual suicide.

“Their remains are in Tokyo, and this became an instant popular folk deal with the Japanese, first as puppet theater, and then as kabuki theater picked it up, and to this day, the story is still performed in puppet theater and kabuki theater, and any number of television shows and films. It’s still incredibly popular,” Wood continued.

The woodblocks also depict the Five Brave Men, five Robin Hood-like figures who fought wicked samurai in Japanese folktales. They also feature historical scenes like the Battle of Honno-ji, which saw the downfall of the first of Japan’s Three Unifiers, the undoubtedly Machiavellian Oda Nobunaga.

Despite the increasing modernization of Japan, the tales of the samurai proved to be enduringly popular, even after the horrors of a truly modern war laid waste to Japan in 1945. The BMA displays shin-hanga, the classicist prints of the long Japanese tradition, while they’ve partnered with UAB’s Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts to display art influenced by the more modernist sosaku-hanga, prints from the ‘60s and ‘70s on loan from the Museum’s permanent collection. In the process, they show artistic reactions from either end of the most seismic period in Japanese history.

The samurai’s desperation for relevance in a world that seemed to have passed them by sowed the seeds for a profound artistic tradition. That tradition contributed to the militant nationalism of fascist Japan — WWII-era Japanese officers famously bore heirloom katanas — but it also made for the highest expression of national virtues of honor, duty, courage and sacrifice. And in this presentation of the awe-inspiring artifacts of those virtues, Lethal Beauty offers a window into the grand theater of Japanese culture.

Lethal Beauty will show from June 28 to Sept. 21, with a special preview on Friday, June 27. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays. Tickets are $10 and are not sold after 4 p.m. each day. For more information, call (205) 254-2565 or visit artsbma.org.

Back in December, Weld gave previewing the highlights of the spring music season in Birmingham the old college try, despite the fact that a booked calendar was but a twinkle in the eye of most venues in town that early on. Since suffering builds character, we figured we’d give it another go for the summer of 2014, which looks poised to build on the high bar set by Happenin Fest in May.

The jewel in the crown for Birmingham’s summer music season is, of course, Secret Stages. If City Stages managed to survive as long as it did largely through inertia, Secret Stages has managed to thrive through constant energy, booking exciting young talent from every point on the musical spectrum. On Aug. 1-2, Secret Stages will be building on the momentum of three successful years in downtown’s loft district.

Not every band in the lineup has announced so far, but there are already some highlights to focus on. Hip-hop acts CYNE, Tanya Morgan and locals the Green Seed earn the frequent De La Soul comparisons, thanks to their creative production styles and ability to pack real meaning and heart into their bars without ever coming off as humorless scolds. New Orleans’ Bent Denim and Oxford, Mississippi’s Morgan Pennington and the Echo both make the kind of dream pop that Ryan Gosling could drive around listening to moodily in movies.

Secret Stages has always had a really strong mix of genres, but the standout acts of these early lineups are firmly in the rock ‘n roll side of the ledger. Nashville’s Daniel Pujol – something like a headliner for a festival this size – makes garage rock that hits like a ton of bricks, and he does it with the hip panache of the early Strokes. Fellow Tennesseans Ex-Cult are a weird yet highly effective hybrid of West Coast hardcore and the depressed soul of industrial England circa 1978. Little Rock’s Mad Nomad, a sleeper pick from yours truly, make punk rock that’s long on catharsis and short on pretense.

Speaking of Bottletree, they’ve got as strong a summer lineup as you’d expect. WRAY, local indie rockers coming off a sensational performance at Happenin Fest, will release their new LP on Woodlawn label Communicating Vessels on July 11; self-assured indie pop sextet PHOX will perform July 15; a rejuvenated Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! will be playing in support of their new record Only Run on Aug. 14; and legendary Dinosaur Jr. guitarist J. Mascis will perform at the end of September with Broken Social Scene cofounder Kevin Drew.

The Alys Stephens Center’s summer/fall series isn’t quite as strong as last year’s outstanding lineup, but it does feature one of Birmingham’s American Idols (Ruben Studdard, performing July 17), one of the country’s most well-liked blues musicians in Keb’ Mo’ (Aug. 26) and two of Birmingham’s best songwriters in Duquette Johnston and Armand Margjeka (Sept. 12). On the opposite side of town, Steely Dan (traveling as part of perhaps the worst-named tour in history, “Jamalot Ever After”) and Crosby, Stills and Nash will play the BJCC on July 27 and Aug. 22, respectively.

It should come as no surprise that WorkPlay, arguably Birmingham’s most reliable venue, has got plenty to recommend it over the next three months. Phantogram, performing July 1, will turn the SoundStage into a dance floor with their strange alchemy of haunting vocals and fat beats. On August 8 and 9, full-album cover band Black Jacket Symphony will perform Tom Petty’s 1979 breakout record Damn the Torpedoes, which is still the most popular in his long discography. And if you’ve ever wanted to hear the audio equivalent of drinking a mimosa in South Beach in 1984, electro-pop duos Cherub and Ghost Beach, both playing Sept. 21, are the bill for you.

Around the block, Iron City suffers a little from a still largely unfilled schedule. They’ll make a killing in early October – the slate goes from Cheap Trick to the Head and the Heart to AFI to Fitz & the Tantrums – but the summer highlights are indie rockers Manchester Orchestra (Aug. 7) and Lucius, a girl group playing in support of Lake Street Dive on Sept. 30 who present one of the most intensely powerful vocal performances in pop music today.

Even in the venues with sparser calendars than Iron City, there are still some shows worth earmarking. DIY Birmingham, one of the key supporters of the coolest aspects of the city’s music scene, will celebrate its fourth birthday with a big to-do at the Spring Street Firehouse on July 26. Christian rockers NEEDTOBREATHE’s Sept. 11 show at the Alabama will probably sell like hotcakes without any mention from us, but here’s your note anyhow. Speaking of bands that don’t need our help to sell tickets, Phish are playing the Oak Mountain Amphitheatre on Aug. 8, if you’re into that sort of thing. And fans of classic country should bend an attentive ear toward Whitey Morgan and the 78’s, playing Zydeco July 19.

Just like last time, this list is no doubt woefully incomplete, both due to timing and to pilot error, but there’s still plenty to get excited about. With the mercury rising and only the dog days of baseball (and a U.S. victory in the World Cup, probably) left on TV, it’s reassuring to know that, as always, Birmingham’s venues are here to help you beat the heat.

]]>https://weldbham.com/blog/2014/06/19/coming-attractions-summer-edition/feed/0Coming of age in Birminghamhttps://weldbham.com/blog/2014/06/12/coming-of-age-in-birmingham/
https://weldbham.com/blog/2014/06/12/coming-of-age-in-birmingham/#respondFri, 13 Jun 2014 02:15:18 +0000http://weldbham.com/?p=17311Drew Price embraces the familiar while obsessing over the strange on new LP.

Drew Price has had an awfully long career for a 24-year-old. After playing shows at dearly departed all-ages venue Cave9, Price found success with his home recordings online, catching positive attention from outlets like VICE. On the new LP Hustle Strange, released by Montevallo’s Happenin Records last month,Price has consolidated the most effective elements of his early career in an affecting, infectious record.

Price garners immediate comparisons to Canadian indie rocker Mac DeMarco, another young musician with a knack for making pop songs that alternate between easygoing chill and melancholic languor. That fails to mention, however, that Price has been making music like this for six years or more; Hustle Strange is less a stab at indie relevance than it is a return to first principles after Price’s synth-drenched last LP, 2013’s Friends and Family.

In this case, “first principles” means guitar-centric pop music, although it’s a deeply retrospective approach to the form, exploring the salient notes of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. On the first half of the record, the guitar isn’t so much played as drizzled on top like chocolate syrup, one relaxed texture in an ocean of calm.

Those soothing sounds – Happenin Records cofounder Dustin Timbrook described one of the record’s singles, “If All,” as “aloe to your eardrums” – dominate the beginning and end of a record that’s about, more than anything, growing up. Despite its West Coast trappings, Hustle Strange comes off as not just a Southern record, but a Birmingham record; a record about friends, home and finding a purpose – and “a fleeting taste of family.”

Critically, Price’s wistfulness isn’t afraid to go to dark places, carried aloft by some unexpectedly moving lyricism. On the opening track, “Angry Drunk,” Price starts in a down-and-out reverie, focusing on a narrator at the end of his tether and without enough appreciation for the people who could help him out of his rut; “Keep your friends around just in case,” Price sings bitterly.

One of the central articles of faith in the album, however, is a sincere belief in the salvation found in friendship. “Sported Tame,” the very next song, claws out of the gloom with what may well be the album’s mission statement: “Take a chance on love; it’s worth a try. Take another heart, and make it stranger.”

That ongoing sense of strangeness – an uncomfortable liminal space between complete anomie and complete comfort with the real world – is the dominant theme of the record, as Price struggles to grow up in a city that is itself struggling to grow up around him. The theme of strangeness crystallizes on hooky lead single “Of a Feeling,” which focuses on the opportunities Birmingham gives him to find his roots while pointing out the challenges of authentic commitment. “Would you be the deceiver?” Price sings. “Would you actually care?”

The emerging obsession with the idea of strangeness signals a shift in the album’s musical style – which pushes “chill” music about as far as it can possibly go – into a fuzzed-out direction that is the high-water mark of Price’s ongoing dalliance with psychedelia. Things get weird, and that’s exactly where Drew Price’s Bermuda Triangle shines.

Beginning with the giddy absurdity of “Time Will Tell,” Hustle Strange embarks on a psychedelic suite that may well be the highlight of the record, a passionate outburst that complements the record’s earlier serenity perfectly while providing some much-needed energy. At its best, Hustle Strange combines the shoegaze noise of the early Elephant 6 bands with the street cool of Lou Reed, creating an irresistible, unique synthesis (“Punky Flood and Wire”). It’s a sonic journey through the nooks and crannies of the Boomer salad days, traveling back in time from CBGB to Woodstock.

Eventually, Price settles on sharing his journey through strangeness with his friends on the album closer “Help Me Out,” a gorgeous denouement. It’s a little slice of pop magic, and it’s only fitting that on a backwards-looking record about discovering what matters in the world, Price gets by with a little help from his friends.

]]>https://weldbham.com/blog/2014/06/12/coming-of-age-in-birmingham/feed/0Leaving the crossroadshttps://weldbham.com/blog/2014/05/29/leaving-the-crossroads/
https://weldbham.com/blog/2014/05/29/leaving-the-crossroads/#commentsFri, 30 May 2014 04:36:05 +0000http://weldbham.com/?p=17166Local musician Corey Nolen takes the long way home on new alt-country LP.

“If we’d ever start listening to reason, we’d have no reason to go,” local songwriter Corey Nolen sings on “Find a Way,” the first track on his new alt-country record Drive Down South. “If we’d ever start moving forward, we’d be more lost than we were before.” These are straightforward lines about ambivalent feelings – about heartbreak, doubt, and no easy routes to redemption or happiness – and they place Drive Down South securely in an Alabamian songwriting lineage dating back to Hank Sr.

Nolen first started playing music professionally after graduating from Birmingham-Southern College in the mid-’90s. The pressure of trying to succeed as a songwriter in the Birmingham scene of the time proved too much for him, and he settled down into an uncomfortable routine of working odd jobs like selling ID badges – one year of seven-days-a-week work netted Nolen $5,000 – and delivering sheetrock. Regarding the latter, Nolen echoed Monty Python’s Life of Brian, saying, “It wasn’t so bad. At least I got to be outside.

“That was a time in my life where I felt like I had let go of the thing I loved, and that I didn’t really have a clear direction,” Nolen added. “[Photography] kind of pulled me out of despair and gave me some purpose in my life.” Nolen’s career in photography blossomed into a self-sustaining business, one that played to the strengths he had already established as a songwriter.

“I’m a storyteller,” Nolen said. “I like to communicate, whether that’s in words or in pictures. It kind of comes back to the fact that I like to hear people’s stories and that I like to share those in some way.”

With some encouragement from fellow musicians around Birmingham, Nolen eventually started writing songs again, and the long layoff isn’t apparent in the polished finished product of Drive Down South. The first three songs on the record show a remarkable amount of genre versatility from a debut effort, going from Ryan Adams-style alt-country (“Find A Way”) to an old-fashioned country lament (“Haunt Me”) to a more rocking, cathartic style (“I Thought That I Loved You”).

That middle song, “Haunt Me,” is one of the highlights of the album, drawing from Nolen’s localized experiences in a way that still feels universal, even poetic. The heartbroken narrator is so desperate for his old flame that he’d rather have the failed relationship live on as a revenant than move on: “So why won’t you haunt me like a ghost?” Nolen sings. “Be the sounds that I don’t know, see your face on the pane of my window? And I want you to move my things around, so that when I hear that door slamming, I’ll know that you’ve been here all along – and I am not alone.”

The heartfelt lyricism makes appearances throughout, as Nolen balances witty flourishes with a kind of blue collar directness. That balancing act is at least in part derived from Nolen’s awareness of the need for commercial viability after struggling in his first go-round as a musician, and it comes as no surprise that a trip to Nashville helped to inspire the record. On the one hand, the pop sensibility that occasionally crops up makes for the album’s weakest moment (the honky-tonk “Learning from Losing”), but on the other it makes the record immediately accessible.

Another key factor in the record’s instant appeal is its first-rate production quality. Nolen’s supporting cast is excellent on Drive Down South, but Birmingham-raised producer Brian T. Murphy’s talent for turning the instrumentation of classic country into such an immersive, atmospheric sound – most notably Matt Knapp’s evocative pedal steel guitar – makes him stand out as the album’s secret weapon.

The instrumentation on the record is traditional – Act of Congress member Adam Wright contributes beautiful mandolin on the two tracks that close out the album, for instance – but Nolen and company walk the line between traditional and “alt” country throughout.

“Traditional country is now alt-country,” Nolen says of the distinction. “But it seems like what is considered modern country hijacked the term. Bands like Whiskeytown, Son Volt, Wilco, they sort of started to carry this label of alt-country. And they made it possible for people like me to say, ‘Oh, that’s what I like. I like Ryan Adams, I like his aesthetic.’ … I don’t see it as much different than what I loved in the ‘80s.”

That sense of going back to basics wouldn’t count for much, though, if Nolen couldn’t deliver emotionally resonant songs. “The majority of the songs are about me,” Nolen said. “They’re very personal. Everything might be first-person, even if they’re not my story. And the majority of those things are things that I went through. The hard thing is seeing something happen in somebody else’s life and making something out of that.”

On songs like the slow redemption tale “What I Had Coming,” Nolen serves in a role akin to Jimmy Webb’s with “Wichita Lineman,” finding striking stories of love and tweaking the details for the sake of the song. “A guy can tell me his story, but I’ve got to take it and make it my own in a way so that the listener can feel it, so that I can communicate that in an authentic way,” Nolen said.

Nolen still has room to grow as a songwriter, but in the successes of Drive Down South – professionalism, emotional maturity and a lot of heart – he’s given himself a very exciting foundation to build on.

T-Rex tiny gallery, a new addition to the burgeoning Crestwood arts scene located at 4911 5th Ave. S., will have its grand opening on the evening of Friday, May 30. As the final installment of Burgin Mathews’ ongoing Sun Ra series noted earlier in this week’s issue, the gallery’s first show will be a series of works inspired by Birmingham’s most magical citizen.

Born Herman “Sonny” Blount in May of 1914, the cosmic jazz musician Sun Ra claimed to hail from Saturn, and his relationship with hometown of Birmingham was complicated at best, as Mathews’ magisterial series has so deftly illustrated. While in the middle of intensifying his new persona, the “alien” Sun Ra left Birmingham – a very real reminder of humanity and its frailties – in 1946.

Sun Ra returned to the Magic City after his induction to the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1988, and he played a show with his Arkestra at the Nick in August of that year. It was the far-out bandleader’s first show in Birmingham in three decades.

Local artist and autodidact Craig Legg was at that show, and he’s based a series of 20 works – painting, collage and assemblage – on the photographs he took there. Sun Ra is considered by most to be a trailblazer in the afro-futurist movement, making the sci-fi-infused grooves of acts like Parliament-Funkadelic possible. Legg seems to be deeply influenced by that forward-looking strand of Sun Ra’s career, since his paintings are simultaneously primitivist and iconic, representing the immediacy of the show and the outsized personalities on display.

In addition to Legg’s show, the grand opening of T-Rex is a community-oriented event, with attendees encouraged to walk around the 4900 block and learn about the other new businesses and studios in the area. Ferocious Dogs, the vegetarian-friendly hot dog truck, will be on hand to provide food.

T-Rex tiny gallery will have its grand opening at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, May 30. Craig Legg’s show will run through August 15. For more information, call (561) 758-2562.

After two successfulsummers at Huntsville’s Lowe Mill arts center, Happenin Fest will be relocating to Good People Brewing Company on the afternoon of Saturday, May 24. While the music festival – which takes its name from Happenin Records, a micro indie label out of Montevallo – is moving to the Magic City in a marriage of convenience, it’s also to celebrate the many vibrant, and increasingly connected, elements of Birmingham culture.

Founded in 2006 by Chris McCauley and Dustin Timbrook, Happenin Records has blossomed into one of the most rejuvenating examples of the DIY ethos in the greater Birmingham area. The label has survived as a business venture largely because of its founders’ enthusiasm and its well-honed aesthetic (McCauley, for one, credits the gorgeous work of designer Derek Prevatt for the festivals’ success). Whatever the genre of music, all of the Happenin acts are unified by an infectious, sincere love of a good time. The off-label acts who round out the Happenin Fest bill fit in seamlessly by providing some of the most joyous, entertaining music in indie rock today.

“As long as it seems like it’s coming from a real place, as long as it seems like the person who is creating the music is committed to it and that they love what they’re putting out there, it’s hard for someone to deny that,” said McCauley, event organizer and frontman of pop-punk band Holy Youth. “Whether I’m looking at a country artist or an electric artist or a punk artist, if I get the sense that this person is coming at this from a very earnest, real, deeply creative place, then I’ll put whatever free time I have into putting it out there.

“You might not sell out the BJCC if you sign with Happenin, but we can help you have some fun,” McCauley added.

That sense of fun, completely devoid of hipster irony, is one of the things that make the Happenin Fest lineup such an easy pitch. Just the acts from Nashville alone would constitute a bill that’s worth the $10 ticket: Jeff the Brotherhood, whose 2012 record Hypnotic Nights was produced by Black Key Dan Auerbach, offer pitch-perfect, sun-bleached garage rock; Natural Child, returning from the original Happenin Fest lineup, bring riff-heavy Southern rock; and the Google-unfriendly Music Band combine the aggression of the Stooges with the sonic palette of the 13th Floor Elevators. Miami’s Jacuzzi Boys are a chalk pick to put on one of the best shows of the day, since their anthemic approach to new wave is ideal summertime music.

Both Price and Swinford expressed excitement about seeing their label-mates Vacation Club, a dreamy pop-punk act out of Indianapolis, perform in Birmingham for the first time. “They know how to have a good time,” Price said. “If anybody’s living the lifestyle of their music, it’s these dudes. They’re insane. … That’s something about live music – you either believe it or you don’t. And there’s no doubt with these guys.”

Price, who’s been performing in venues around town since he was 14 years old, feels that Happenin Fest couldn’t have happened in the Birmingham music scene he grew up in. Now, however, the cultural infrastructure is in place to support it, from forward-thinking breweries to radio stations that incubate an appreciation for the entire musical spectrum.

“We [as musicians] want to lean on other cultures, but we want them to lean on us, too,” Price said. “We want to be a vessel for cultural flourishing. All of it – so many things are happening all at once. I think that it’s not just a rock ‘n roll thing; I think that it involves the perspectives and endeavors of everybody else, all the other cultures and businesses leaning on each other.”

Happenin Fest – whose sponsors include, among others, Substrate Radio, Seasick Records and Weld for Birmingham, and which will feature numerous local food trucks on site throughout the day – moved from Huntsville with a mind to be a distinctly Birmingham festival, according to McCauley.

“We wanted it to be Birmingham-centric, but also, from a bird’s eye view, something community-oriented,” McCauley said. “I don’t make beer, so the guys who brew great beer can provide that beer; I don’t run an internet radio station, but Substrate does, and they’re awesome. It was just finding the people who thrive in their own little realm of expertise and collaborating and complementing one another as a result.”

In McCauley’s mind, it’s just one contribution that he and his friends can make to the broader cultural renaissance in Birmingham. Following social theorist Steven Johnson, McCauley said, “You’ve got to create downtowns in such a way that people with different ideas and different interests can run into each other, so that even if they’re different, they can exchange ideas and create something great. You’ve got to make opportunities for people to randomly interact; that’s where all the great inventions and cultural innovation comes from.”

That kind of serendipitous cross-pollination between different aspects of Birmingham culture makes for an ambitious goal, but the beauty of Happenin Fest is that ambition is never the first priority.

“You’re not gonna start a war with this music,” Swinford said. He’s right – you’re just gonna have fun.

Happenin Fest will take place at Good People Brewing Company on Saturday, May 24, with the first show kicking off at 3 p.m. Tickets are $10. For more information on the festival and its lineup, visit happeninrecords.com.

The interactive event will feature teams centered around each of these issues facing Birmingham, following them as they travel, Candyland style, through a host of civic challenges. With a limited war chest to draw on to help with random challenges (such as hiring Alexander Shunnarah for someone injured in a billboard accident), each team has to navigate away from the Molasses Swamp of demagoguery and empty sloganeering.

The team that succeeds in the first round will have the unenviable task of answering questions from the United States citizenship test in the second round. I Believe in Birmingham founder Joseph Baker, AL.com columnist John Archibald and Weld Publisher Mark Kelly will serve as judges throughout the night.

“Civic engagement is cool now. It’s not just for squares anymore,” said show organizer and emcee Max Rykov. “Sometimes, though, there’s a very serious tone on internet comment threads, and things can get very nasty when you’re anonymous. So with this event, instead of the glamourless cave of internet anonymity, you find yourself commenting on things amid a crowd of people.”

“It’s basically a live version of getting likes on a Facebook comment thread, with hilarious consequences,” Rykov added.

“This is an opportunity for people to talk about these things in person in a friendly, fun environment,” Rykov said. “We’re not looking for right or wrong answers. We’re looking for interesting answers.”